At Meltwater, our teams have the flexibility to select the programming languages that best suit their needs. With many options available, JVM languages have emerged as a popular choice.
For managing JVM projects, some teams opt for Gradle, my team prefers using Maven as a project management tool.
One of the features that Gradle has been offering for years is build caching, which we, as Maven users, were envious of until Maven released the maven cache build extension in version 3.9.0 as of June 2023.
The Maven Build Cache Extension is a tool that helps to improve build efficiency by reusing outputs that were generated in previous builds. This cache system stores build outputs either locally or remotely. When inputs have not been modified, new builds can retrieve these outputs from the cache. This approach saves time by avoiding the regeneration of outputs, resulting in more efficient and quicker build processes.
In this article, we will explore the benefits of using the extension and how it can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline. I have also created a github repository for a sample remote server and application, which I will refer to below to explain the actions and concepts.