[ajug-members] Java EE default project layout

[Ron Cordell]

I inherited a project that was built with Maven 1.0.2, and there were a lot
of things to like about it. Everything for the project, documentation,
building jars, wars, ears and such can be handled with Maven. But I ripped
out Maven and replaced it with Ant. Many people might think that this is a
step backwards, and I'd have to agree. But the problem with Maven 1.x was
that it takes too long to make changes to it because it's so hard to
understand. Most things Maven does is implicit, rather than explicit like
Ant. Maven relies completely on plugins, but each plugin has idiosyncrasies
that result in slight different behavior from plugin to plugin. The promise
of Maven is clear, especially on larger projects where there are many
inter-related sub-projects that can be built in tandem. But for a simple to
medium level project, I came to the conclusion that it was too expensive to
maintain and modify Maven.

Outside Maven, there are components and IDE plugins that also want to
dictate project structure. I'm thinking of things like MyEclipseIDE, which
wants your project to be set up in a specific way. I haven't looked at
recent releases of MyEclipseIDE, but there wasn't any way to map there
expected structure to your physical directory layout, much like NetBeans
allows you to do with basic java projects. These complicate things quite a
bit and reduce the number of options in some ways.

I'm looking foward to reading some of the articles and info people have put
forward on this thread as they look quite interesting.

-Ron Cordell
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