Most of Maven's functionality is in plugins. A plugin provides a set of goals that can be
executed using the following syntax:
mvn [plugin-name]:[goal-name]
For example, a Java project can be compiled with the compiler-plugin's compile-goal by
running mvn compiler:compile . There are Maven plugins for building, testing, source
control management, running a web server, generating Eclipse project files, and much
more. Plugins are introduced and configured in a <plugins>-section of a pom.xml file.
Some basic plugins are included in every project by default, and they have sensible default
settings.