Finding list of versions available in a Maven repository for a specific plugin?

Question

Given the following repository URL from my pom.xml how can I determine what the latest versions of spring and hibernate are available in the repository? http://repo1.maven.org/maven2

Answer 1

Retrieve the maven-metadata.xml file, placed in the artifact directory, e.g. https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/sun/media/jai_codec/maven-metadata.xml for an artifact with the groupId com.sun.media and artifactId jai_codec.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<metadata>
  <groupId>com.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>project</artifactId>
  <versioning>
    <latest>0.0.5</latest>
    <release>0.0.5</release>

    <versions>
      <version>0.0.3</version>
      <version>0.0.4</version>
      <version>0.0.5</version>
    </versions>
    <lastUpdated>20090725212606</lastUpdated>
  </versioning>

</metadata>