Maven is a building tool.
Features of maven :
pom.xml : an XML for project as well as a module . You can specify the build related information in pom.xml and maven takes care of build , packaging etc.
Unit Testing : You can run your junit as part of the build , maven also generates report for the test result.
Repository : maven has its own repository with almost all major library jars available.
Local repository : its a directory in users PC which has the jars downloaded from the server repository.
Resources: maven automatically takes care of moving your xmls,property files appropriate places. You can add the xmls,property files to resources folder.
Set up Maven :
Repository :
You can set the location of maven repository in file setting.xml at path MAVEN_HOME/conf