 <p>Maven is a build/deploy tool. It is similar in use to <strong>cmake</strong> or <strong>ant</strong>. It can be plugged in eclipse via plugins, it can be used to deploy wars/jars to tomcat/jboss/websphere etc. It can run test suites and many more.</p> <p>You should take a look at Maven In 5 Minutes.</p> <p><a href="http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html" rel="nofollow">http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html</a></p>