If you want to know how we created our Maven Archetype for JVx, simply check the source code. The project is Open Source and licensed under Apache 2.0.

The project contains a simple ANT build with two important targets. The first is start.complete. This target creates the archetype archive and deploys it to our sonatype repository. The second target is start.recreate. This target is very cool because it cleans the archetype project (mvn clean), installs the archetype in your local repository (mvn install) and creates a new project based on the installed archetype (mvn archetype:generate).

Usually, you have to use scripts, the command-line or external tools to do all your tests. We automated the whole process. Our build uses the maven integration for ant.

The integration tasks were a little bit strange but after some tests we made it working. The trick was that the build.xml and pom.xml files must be stored in separate folders. Otherwise project creation based on an archetype didn't work.