I.e. an abstract representation of a kind of project that can be instantiated into a concrete customised Maven 2 project.
An archetype knows which files will be part of the instantiated project and which properties to fill to properly customise the project.
Each archetype defines a set of common properties:
The minimal content of the jar file is:
. |-- META-INF | `-- maven | `-- archetype-metadata.xml [1] `-- archetype-resources |-- ... [2] `-- pom.xml [3]
The common properties should be renamed to $target.groupId, ... to avoid name clash.