Artifactory is software that The SOA and Internet development teams have been using for a while. If you have never heard of it, Artifactory is a binary repository manager. We use source control for our source code, Artifactory is version control (and more) for your binary artifacts (jar/war files, etc). Artifactory is also a place where you can put a shared library so that it is easily accessible in other projects across the enterprise.
For someone who has never used a binary repository and wants to understand the benefits of using a tool like Artifactory here is a great (short) presentation: Artifactory – Sharing Binaries the Smart Way!
Why use Artifactory?
Rebuilding from source introduces points of failure and change. By having an artifact in a binary repository you have a versioned copy of the tested artifact.
Since the binaries are version it is easy to have multiple versions of libraries so that all projects do not have to be on the same version.
Artifactory can be integrated with a CI server such as Jenkins so that clean builds are automatically published with meta data about the build.
Artifactory has “virtual repositories” that are proxies to all of the “well known” maven repositories on the internet. This give you access to most of the public shared libraries such as Apache Commons, Spring, Hibernate, etc..; through one conduit.
It is expensive and inefficient for every developer inside the same organization to go and retrieve remote artifacts that are shared by nature.