Today when we containerize our application for cloud deployment, it’s the same general idea: encapsulate the dependent and its dependency into a single unit to hide some complexity. Over the years I came across this idea in many places. Then users don’t need to have a particular version or even any version of Java pre-installed - a neat solution to a specific problem. The idea was to include within the artifact itself the Java Runtime Environment that our application depended on. Looking around trying to find how others had solved this problem, I came across this idea of “bundling the JRE”. Asking them to download, install, and configure version 1.2 of Java (yes, this was that long ago!) to run our application would have been a hassle for them. We wanted to share our artifact with a couple of business users in the field to get some feedback. Years ago, I was on a team developing a desktop-based Java application. In this article, we’ll learn about the Maven Wrapper - what problem it solves, how to set it up, and how it works.
