Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Starting a New Project

Part of the hassle of setting up a new project is the amount of effort involved in creating a "development infrastructure"—automated builds, unit tests, documentation, project reporting, etc. Using Maven, you can accelerate this process by generating a skeleton project which can be used as a seed for new applications.

How do I do that?

Maven has an Application Generation plug-in (Genapp) which you can use to create a new project. Start by creating an empty c:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp\test-application directory that will house the generated application. Run the Genapp plug-in by executing the genapp goal, selecting the default template, and supplying some information about your new project:

C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp\test-application>maven genapp
 _ _  _ _
|  \/  |_ _ _Apache_ _ _ _ _
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \  ~ intelligent projects ~
|_|  |_\_ _,_|\_/\_ _ _|_||_|  v. 1.0.2
  
Attempting to download commons-jelly-tags-interaction-20030211.143817.jar.
4K downloaded
Enter a project template to use: [default]
[Enter]
Please specify an id for your application:  [app]
test-application
Please specify a name for your application:  [Example Application]
Test Application
Please specify the package for your application:  [example.app]
mdn.testapp build:start: genapp: [copy] Copying 1 file to C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp\test-application\src\java\ mdn\testapp [copy] Copying 3 files to C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp\test-application\src\test\ mdn\testapp [copy] Copying 1 file to ...