I have created a lot of small applications that include spring and acegi. Most of the time I copy most of the resources from another project. Some time ago I learned about the maven archetypes. An easy way to create the project structure. That was the time I decided that I wanted to have my acegi springframework archetype. Last weeks I found some time to create this archetype. You can download the files here:
http://code.google.com/p/gridshore/
And the generated maven site here:
http://www.gridshore.nl/projects/springframeworkarchetype/index.html
Ofcourse there is also a maven website about creating an archetype, this is not a very extensive website. In this blog item I will explain more about the archetype I created.

First thing to know, well surprise, the archetype is just a maven project. You can start you new archetype by using a maven archetype:
mvn archetype:create
-DgroupId=nl.gridshore.samples.archetype
-DartifactId=SpringframeworkArchetype
-DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart
Have a look at the pom for the other properties; scm, distributionManagement, etc.

The project itself contains an src\main\resources\META-INF\maven\archetype.xml file that defines all the resources that need to be copied.

<archetype>

  <id>SpringframeworkArchetype</id>

  <sources>

    <source>src/main/java/App.java</source>

  </sources>

  <testSources>

    <source>src/test/java/AppTest.java</source>

  </testSources>

  <resources>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/index.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/action-servlet.xml</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsps/welcome.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsps/adminwelcome.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsps/accessdenied.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsps/login.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsps/loginerror.jsp</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/security-springConfig.xml</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/views.properties</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/errormessages.properties</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/sitetext.properties</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/log4j.dtd</resource>

      <resource>src/main/resources/log4j.xml</resource>

  </resources>

</archetype>

The structure is pretty easy, you can find all the resources under the directory:
src\main\resources\archetype-resources

You can use the following parameters in your file as placeholders:
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-archetype-plugin/create-mojo.html. Have a look at the src\main\resources\archetype-resources\pom.xml for an example:

  <groupId>$groupId</groupId>

  <artifactId>$artifactId</artifactId>

  <version>$version</version>

Hope that helps you on your way to your own archetype. If you just want to use mine:

mvn install

mvn archetype:create

	-DgroupId=your.groupid

	-DartifactId=your.artifactId

	-DarchetypeArtifactId=SpringframeworkArchetype

	-DarchetypeGroupId=nl.gridshore.samples.archetype

	-DarchetypeVersion=1.0.0-SNAPSHOT