What is Maven Snapshot?

Basically, while developing a large scale application, the process involves a series of changes to be made in the application till it is confirmed to be ready as a final release. Because, there could be multiple teams working on an application across different set of modules.

Consider 2 teams A & B working on 2 different modules and say team B will be dependent on the services provided by team A. Say team A is involved in working on some major critical fixes and those fixes will be checked in every day. So team B has to be notified in a way that there are still some pending work by team A and the final version has not yet been released by the team A. This is where the maven's SNAPSHOT comes into the picture.

Snapshot is a special version which indicates the current development copy of the project which is being worked on. For each build, maven always checks out for a SNAPSHOT of the project.

Hence, whenever maven finds a newer SNAPSHOT of the project, it downloads and replaces the older .jar file of the project in the local repository.

Snapshot version always gets some updates/changes being made on the project. Also, Snapshot should exist only during development phase and it will not be having a release version. This implies that the build of the project will be changed at any time and it is still under the development process.

Snapshot Vs Version

In case of SNAPSHOT, Maven will automatically fetch the latest SNAPSHOT (data-service: 1.0-SNAPSHOT) every time CoreJavaTutorials project is built.

In case of Version, maven once downloaded the mentioned version say JavaSamples:1.0, then it will never try to download a newer 1.0 available in repository. To download the updated code, CoreJavaTutorials version is to be upgraded to 1.1.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" 
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 
   http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
   <groupId>CoreJavaTutorials</groupId>
   <artifactId>CoreJavaTutorials</artifactId>
   <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
   <packaging>jar</packaging>
   <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
</project>