What is a maven plugin ?

To execute a single Maven plugin goal, we used the syntax mvn archetype:generate, where archetype is the identifier of a plugin and generate is the identifier of a goal.

A Maven Plugin is a collection of one or more goals. Examples of Maven plugins can be simple core plugins like the Jar plugin, which contains goals for creating JAR files, Compiler plugin, which contains goals for compiling source code and unit tests, or the Surefire plugin, which contains goals for executing unit tests and generating reports. Other, more specialized Maven plugins include plugins like the Hiber- nate3 plugin for integration with the popular persistence library Hibernate, the JRuby plugin which allows you to execute ruby as part of a Maven build or to write Maven plugins in Ruby. Maven also provides for the ability to define custom plugins. 

The core of Maven has little to do with the specific tasks involved in your project’s build. By itself, Maven doesn’t know how to compile your code or even how to make a JAR file. It delegates all of this work to Maven plugins like the Compiler plugin and the Jar plugin, which are downloaded on an as-needed basis and periodically updated from the central Maven repository. When you download Maven, you are getting the core of Maven, which consists of a very basic shell that knows only how to parse the command line, manage a classpath, parse a POM file, and download Maven plugins as needed. By keeping the Compiler plugin separate from Maven’s core and providing for an update mechanism, Maven makes it easier for users to have access to the latest options in the compiler. In this way, Maven plugins allow for universal reusability of common build logic. You are not defining the compile task in a build file; you are using a Compiler plugin that is shared by every user of Maven. If there is an improvement to the Compiler plugin, every project that uses Maven can immediately benefit from this change. (And, if you don’t like the Compiler plugin, you can override it with your own implementation.)