To create a new project based on an Archetype, you need to call mvn archetype:generate goal, like the following: Once these archetypes are created and deployed in your organization's repository, they are available for use by all developers within your organization. You may want to standardize J2EE development within your organization, so you may want to provide archetypes for EJBs, or WARs, or for your web services. You can do anything like this with archetypes.

If, for example, you have used the quick start archetype to generate a working project, you can then quickly create a site for that project by using the site archetype within that existing project. A good example of this is the Maven site archetype. We have also tried to make the Archetype mechanism additive, and by that we mean allowing portions of a project to be captured in an archetype so that pieces or aspects of a project can be added to existing projects.

In a matter of seconds, a new user can have a working Maven project to use as a jumping board for investigating more of the features in Maven. Within the Maven project, we use archetypes to try and get our users up and running as quickly as possible by providing a sample project that demonstrates many of the features of Maven, while introducing new users to the best practices employed by Maven. Using archetypes provides a great way to enable developers quickly in a way consistent with best practices employed by your project or organization. Archetype will help authors create Maven project templates for users, and provides users with the means to generate parameterized versions of those project templates. The name fits as we are trying to provide a system that provides a consistent means of generating Maven projects. An archetype is defined as an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. In short, Archetype is a Maven project templating toolkit.

Introduction to Archetypes What is Archetype?

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