The NetBeans IDE can automatically recognize any existing Apache Maven project. If you have such a project, just use the Open Project dialog (to be invoked via Ctrl-Shift-O keyboard shortcut, icon in the toolbar or the File/Open project menu item). All the recognized Maven projects should be marked by the Maven project type icon. If you select such folder in the file chooser, you get the project’s name and a list of subprojects on the right hand side.

As you can see in the picture above, the project name for Maven-based projects is composed of 2 elements: the POM <name> element (if not present, then <artifactId> element) and the project packaging in brackets. In this example the packaging is maven-plugin. That means the resulting output of the project is a plugin for Maven itself. The most common packagings are "jar", "war", "ejb", and "pom". Depending on the packaging of the project the IDE will automatically change the UI appearance of the opened project. Thus if your project is a .war project, then web application specific features get enabled for such Maven project, such as the possibility to deploy to an application server, web application specific file templates, etc.

If your project contains generated source roots that need to appear in the project’s source path, please make sure that the Maven plugin generating the sources generates them in the target/generated-sources/<toolname> directory where <toolname> is folder specific to the Maven plugin used and acts as source root for the generated sources. Most common maven plugins currently follow this pattern in the default configuration. If you open the project and the sources are not generated yet, you will get compilation errors in classes that use the generated content. Please do a build of the project and the classpath and editor highlighting should be refreshed. Alternatively running just the "mvn generate-sources" build phase should be sufficient.

Apart from working with existing projects, the IDE also offers a way to create new Maven based projects from scratch. The projects are generated using maven-archetype-plugin.

To create a new project, invoke the File/New Project menu item, the action in toolbar or press Ctrl-Shift-N shortcut. In the list of available project types select the "Maven" category and select the first project template named "Maven Project". Hit Next button. On the next panel you will be presented with the available Archetypes. Archetype is a Maven term for what is otherwise called a "project template" in the IDE. The list contains a few hardwired simple archetypes to get you started fast. You can however enter any archetype you want. If you have used Maven archetypes before and have some in your local repository, the list should include your favorite archetypes as well. As you create new projects from archetypes, the list keeps updating and offering you the archetypes you have used before in a privileged position. If you don’t want to use a particular archetype anymore, you can remove it from the list. It will be also removed from the local repository.

If NetBeans knows about the content of remote Maven repositories (more on the new remote repositories feature later in the article) it will present them in an expandable tree at the end of the list. There you can browse for all known archetypes and pick the exact version you want. The IDE will however suggest the latest version of a given archetype at the top level of the expandable tree.

After you have selected your archetype, the next panel will let you customize the properties of the new project. These properties will be passed to the maven archetype plugin which creates the new project. If the execution succeeds, the created project(s) gets opened in the IDE.

NetBeans 6.7: In 6.7, we’ve added 3 new project wizards that let you easily create a Maven based Web, Ejb and Ear projects. The wizards let you pick the J2EE level and the resulting project will be very close to what the standard Ant based projects generate.

NetBeans 6.8, 6.9 In 6.8 and 6.9, the New Project wizards were enhanced to enable the creation of new Maven NetBeans Platform applications, Maven NetBeans modules and Maven OSGi bundles. The option to support OSGi dependencies was added to New Project wizards in 6.9. All specialized wizards can be found under the Maven category of the New Project wizard.

Just like Ant based projects in NetBeans use Ant to perform tasks like Run project, Test project or Debug Single File, the Maven based projects use execution of Maven goals to achieve the tasks at hand. The advantage behind the concept is that your IDE action will always perform the required steps as you have defined them in your project’s POM. Additionally it will do so without changing your project pom.xml file in most cases. What happens when you perform for example "Run Project" action on your project largely depends on what project’s packaging. If it’s a jar project, you will be prompted for a main class to run, if it’s a war or ejb packaging you will have to associate an application server. That will be then used as deployment target your web application. Some basic actions like "Build project" or "Clean project" are defined for all packagings.

The project properties dialog offers just limited capabilities for editing the content of the Maven POM files. As we have shown above it attempts to cover just the most common cases and anything that is related to the IDE integration itself. For anything else you are encouraged to use the XML editor.

Let’s start by opening the POM file for your project. Expand the project’s node the Projects View component. Find the subnode named "Project Files" and expand it as well. The project files driving your project are residing there. You always get the pom.xml file as that one is essential for any Maven Project. There are 2 other files appearing eventually.

If you don’t have these additional files and want to create them, there are shortcut actions to do so available on the Project Files node popup menu. The files will be created for you in the right location and opened in the editor for further editing.

Once you open the pom.xml file in the editor you will notice it’s good old plain xml. No xml namespaces and actually even no attributes. (Attributes might be added in the future versions of Maven as an alternative to sub elements for some parts of the POM though). The syntax coloring, code folding, navigator panel, editor toolbar and popup menu actions are all derived from the xml editor.

Let’s take a look closely at what additional Maven specific features you can use when editing the project object model (POM).

An important part of your Maven based projects is managing it’s classpath dependencies. Dependency management is one of the features of Maven that is best known to users. There is not much difficulty in managing dependencies for a single a project, but when you start getting into dealing with multi-module projects and applications that consist of tens or hundreds of modules this is where Maven can help you a great deal in maintaining a high degree of control and stability. Check detailed information on Apache Maven dependency mechanism.

The IDE lists the project dependencies under one or more subnodes of your project’s node. It will list the compilation dependencies under "Libraries" node, runtime dependencies under "Runtime libraries" and the dependencies required to compile and run your tests under "Test Libraries". Please note that the Runtime and Test Libraries nodes will only be visible if the project has applicable dependency entries to save display space for you.

When you expand the Libraries node you get a flat listing of your project’s dependencies. The direct dependencies (listed in your POM) are in the beginning, transitive ones are at the back and have a desaturated icon to make it obvious they were pulled by one (or more) of your direct dependencies. Every dependency also has icon annotations on the right side of the icon that show if the dependency has javadoc and sources available locally. That’s useful for code completion, debugging and other IDE features. The Libraries node provides popup menu actions for retrieval of sources and javadocs. However please note that some artifacts in central repository don’t have these present.

To download and attach source packages from the maven repository, right-click on the "Libraries" node and select "Download All Library Sources". This can be done from the "Test Libraries" and "Runtime Libraries" nodes as well. Once the source packages are downloaded, you can drill down to a particular class and double-clicking it will open the corresponding source code.

All dependency entries can be browsed, that way you can examine the manifest or some other configuration data present in the jars. They also provide useful actions on the popup menu.

The version control checkout is using Maven SCM on the background, so you don’t need to have the appropriate version control support installed and it even works for systems that are not currently supported by the IDE.

For previous releases, use the property netbeans.hint.license in POM.xml to make Netbeans automatically insert license header in new Java files. Designates the License header template to be used within the project. You need to create the license template first. Go to Tools/Templates and create a new entry under Licenses. The format of the template file name needs to be license-FOO.txt. Your netbeans.hint.license property takes FOO as value then.

The following NetBeans tutorials and videos can provide additional information about how to develop your Maven projects with the NetBeans IDE:

At this point you should be able to take full advantage of the IDE’s Apache Maven support. You learned how to setup the project, how to configure it for work within the IDE, how editor features help you edit your project fast and without mistakes and how to manage your project in general.