[FIXED] What is Bill-Of-Materials in Maven dependency management?

Issue

What is the significant use of Bill-Of-Materials features available in the new Spring release, basically the name sounds good but searched for significant but I fail to find it?

Solution

The Bill Of Materials (aka BOM) is more a Maven concept than a Spring one. It has emerged with the 2.0.x release of Maven when the import scope has been introduced.

This scope let you declare a pom dependency inside your <dependencyManagement> section which will result in a sort of merge of the dependency and its dependant project dependencyManagement section.

The BOM concept came to put that scope in practice, which is no more than a project with a pom.xml having as packaging nature pom and that has only the <dependencyManagement> sectin inside in which we declare all the project dependencies (in your case it should be Spring ones) that are aligned together and should work out of the box.

You can think of a BOM project as a dependency directory that declares all the related projects versions thus save your version resolution efforts.

One your BOM imported into your project descriptor, you no more need to declare the version when declaring a dependecy because it will be inherited from that imported pom and it should the be something like the following:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId> <!-- or any other spring related artifact -->
</dependency>

Answered By - tmarwen