What is POM in Maven?

POM stands for Page Object Model. It is the fundamental unit of work in Maven. A pom.xml file resides in the base directory of the project. This file contains information about the project and various configuration details used by Maven to build the projects.

Moreover, POMs contain goals and plugins. When a user executes a task or goal, Apache Maven looks for the POM in the current directory. It then reads the POM and acquires any configuration that is needed for the execution of the goal. Some of these configurations are as follows:

• project dependencies
• plugins
• goals
• build profiles
• project version
• developers
• mailing list

The default POM of Maven is known as the Super POM. The base POM contains values inherited by default in all other POMs. Maven uses the effective configuration from the super pom plus project configuration. This helps developers to specify minimum configurations in their pom.xml. Although, these configurations can be overridden easily.