Does maven automatically download artifact dependencies?

Question

I've been working with Maven for a little while now and I had a question about the information shown on the Maven Repository site. I was looking at the tags to paste into my pom for spring-web-mvc 3.2.8.RELEASE and noticed the table with the header "this artifact depends on" and saw the host of artifacts listed below.

My question is simple: Am I supposed to include the all of the dependencies listed in that table in my pom?

Answer 1

To answer your question, no you do not need to include all of the dependencies listed in the artifact dependencies section. It is my understanding that when you include a dependency in your pom file, maven will automatically download any needed jars. I am inferring this due to the fact that I personally don't add any of the artifact's dependencies other than what I need to my pom.

For example if I wanted spring-core I would do the following:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.8.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

And maven will automatically take care of the dependencies for me.

A good way to test this out is to open a new maven project in eclipse and specify a dependency such as this, update the project, and then check in the Maven dependencies folder.

For fun, I experimented with this and it is indeed true, Maven will download any necessary dependencies when you update your project. After putting only the above dependency in my pom.xml file I got the following:

Answer 2

No need to download all those. Maven will take care of all the artifact's dependencies for the specified dependency mentioned in pom file.