12.1. Introduction to Maven Archetypes
An archetype is a template for a Maven project which is used by the
Maven Archetype plugin to create new projects. Archetypes are useful
for open source projects such as Apache Wicket or Apache Cocoon which
want to present end-users with a set of baseline projects that can be
used as a foundation for new applications. Archetypes can also be
useful within an organization that wants to encourage standards across
a series of similar and related projects. If you work in an
organization with a large team of developers who all need to create
projects which follow a similar structure, you can publish an
archetype that can be used by all other members of the development
team. You can create a new project from an archetype using the Maven
Archetype plugin from the command line or by using the project
creation wizard in the m2eclipse plugin introduced in
Developing
with Eclipse and Maven.
