I'm also using eclipse aether to download artifacts. I find starting with eclipse aether is a bit harder than the older sonatype aether but here is a small sample project I have created as part of an open-source project: MavenPP
Starting with Maven 3.1, Sonatype Aether(github.com/sonatype/sonatype-aether ) was replaced with Eclipse Eather(www.eclipse.org/aether ). Now, sometimes we need do download additional Artifacts from Maven repositories during execution time of custom Maven plugins. As the Maven and Aether documentation is not very handsome, here is a short example about how to programmatically download and resolve Maven Artifacts using Maven 3.1 and later with the Eclipse Aether API: