Introduction

Sonatype has released a nifty utility called Maven Shell that allows developers to execute maven goals/phases in a pre-loaded shell environment, significantly reducing the build time.  It does this by loading up a JVM, Maven, and any loaded plugin once and leverages that existing load for each subsequent build.  I downloaded the .10 binary and played around with it with a very simple multi-module project.  Here is a quick primer on some of the things you can expect from Maven Shell.