I'm far from the expert in dealing with this, but Maven's "assembly" plugin will do what you need: make your staging area, populate it, and zip it up in the end.
We do something similar: I need to produce an "autorun" CD image: we build, with each jar having its own directory and maven pom, and then a "packaging" pom that just generates .war files, and then another "packaging" pom that generates a .zip of the CD image. (It's much more complex than that in sheer number of components, so I can't give you a sample directory structure easily, but I'm sure someone else will speak up :) Something like: Parent\pom.xml <- placeholder, effectively jar1\pom.xml <- generates your .jar war1\pom.xml <- generates your .war dist1\pom.xml <- generates an assembly putting all the pieces together dist1\dist.xml <- descriptor (http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly.html) dist1\resources <- "flat" files needed in your assembly, referred to in the pom Does that help? Dana Lacoste -----Original Message----- From: Danny MacMillan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 2:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Newbie Question: How do I represent my current Ant builds with Maven? Hi, I've looked at Maven, read quite a bit of the documentation, and I can't figure out quite how to represent my current typical Ant build with Maven. Hopefully someone here can help me. I write a lot of console utilities in Java. These are comprised of the original code for the utility, that goes in a jar, 3rd-party libraries the utility uses, and ancillary files. Today, my typical folder structure for one of these projects looks like this: trunk (contains IDE project files, build.xml, build.properties) trunk/dist (contains content to be deployed 'as is') trunk/dist/doc (contains product documentation) trunk/dist/etc (configuration files read at runtime) trunk/dist/lib (holds 3rd-party jars) trunk/dist/... trunk/java (main source code) trunk/test (test source code) I have a 'deploy' target in my ant build that 1. copies the contents of 'dist' to a staging area for deployment 2. then compiles the java source into a jar 3. copies the jar to the staging area dist/lib directory 4. zips up the staging area The product is a zip file I can take to a client's site and deploy by unzipping and editing a few configuration files (which exist in their unedited state in trunk/dist/etc) and possibly batch files (which exist in their unedited state in trunk/dist). Everything I read about Maven suggests that there should be one build product per Maven project. Okay, I can see creating a project just for the jar holding the compiled Java code, but I can't quite wrap my head around what I'm 'supposed' to do here for the non-Java source files (the batch files, the configuration files, etc.) Switching to Maven becomes a non-starter because at a minimum I need to duplicate the functionality that is currently present in my ant builds. I would appreciate any guidance or advice you can offer. -- Danny MacMillan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]