ok actually i didnt get the idea of dependencies and repositories in maven… it just worked… but know i do 🙂
instead of downloading and installing different jar files on your local maschine and on every other server, just tell maven to do it. with dipendencies maven knows which jars it should get and with repositories maven know where to get them… actually the mechanism stores an local copy of the jars in a local repository, and tries first to get it from there… and because of en unique jar version number, updating to new packages in the local repository is maven pom.xml driven.
with this mechanism it is really easy to guarantee the runability of an project… hmm… and when does maven install complete servers?