I'm also learning maven
If the third party jar you are looking for is not present in maven repo, then you can copy the jar to your local maven repository / you can specify the remote repo that you want to be looking at using 'maven.repo.remote' property in your project.properties i guess.
OR
If you depend on xyz-1.2.jar which is not present in maven repo and you have the jar file with you, then i guess you create a folder
xyz\jars under {user-profile}.maven\repository and copy your jar file there.
and in the dependency you can specify
<groupId>xyz<groupId>
<artifactId>xyz</artificatId>
<version>1.2</version>
and maven should source that jar from the local repository instead of looking at maven remote repo.
If the jar you are lookig for is hosted at say
http://www.abc.org/dist/jar/xyz1.2.jar and
'maven.repo.remote' is pointing to 'http://www.abc.org'
then specifying something like this in in project.xml should work?
<groupId>dist<groupId>
<artifactId>xyz</artificatId>
<version>1.2</version>
[ October 28, 2005: Message edited by: Karthik Guru ]
[ October 28, 2005: Message edited by: Karthik Guru ]