Unlike Ant, Maven helps you create the skeleton of a new project. To do that, you will have to type the following command:

    $ mvn archetype:generate

Maven will first download the actually available project types from the network and prompt you to select the one you want to use. This approach seemed to be a good idea while Maven was new. When I first started Maven, the number of listed projects was somewhere between 10 and 20. Today, as I write this book, it lists 1,635 different archetypes. This number seems more like a historical date (the constitution of the French Academy of Science) than a usable size list of different archetypes. However, do not freak out. Maven offers a default value when it asks for your choice, and it is good for the HelloWorld we go for.

    Choose a number: 817: 

The actual number may be different on your installation. Whatever it is, accept the suggestion and press Enter. After that, Maven will ask you for the version of the project:

    Choose version: 
1: 1.0-alpha-1
2: 1.0-alpha-2
3: 1.0-alpha-3
4: 1.0-alpha-4
5: 1.0
6: 1.1
Choose a number: 6: 5

Select the 1.0 version that is listed as number 5. The next thing Maven asks for is the group ID and the artifact ID of the project. The dependency management that we will discuss later uses these. I selected a group ID based on the book and the publisher. The artifact of the project is SortTutorial as we will start our chapter example in this project.

Define value for property 'groupId': : packt.java9.by.example
Define value for property 'artifactId': : SortTutorial

The next question is the current version of the project. We have already selected 1.0 and Maven offers 1.0-SNAPSHOT. Here, I selected 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT because I prefer semantic versioning.

Define value for property 'version':  1.0-SNAPSHOT: : 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

Maven handles the versions that have the -SNAPSHOT postfix as non-release versions. While we develop the code, we will have many versions of our code, all having the same snapshot version number. On the other hand, non-snapshot version numbers can only be used only for a single version.

Define value for property 'package':  packt.java9.by.example: :

The last question from the program skeleton generation is the name of the Java package. The default is the value we gave for groupId, and we will use this. It is a rare exception to use something else.

When we have specified all the parameters that are needed, the final request is to confirm the setting:

Confirm properties configuration: 
groupId: packt.java9.by.example 
artifactId: SortTutorial 
version: 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT 
package: packt.java9.by.example 
 Y: : Y

After entering Y, Maven will generate the files that are needed for the project and display the report about this:

[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------- 
[INFO] Using following parameters for creating project from Old (1.x) Archetype: maven-archetype-quickstart:1.0 
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------- 
[INFO] Parameter: basedir, Value: .../mavenHelloWorld 
[INFO] Parameter: package, Value: packt.java9.by.example 
[INFO] Parameter: groupId, Value: packt.java9.by.example 
[INFO] Parameter: artifactId, Value: SortTutorial 
[INFO] Parameter: packageName, Value: packt.java9.by.example 
[INFO] Parameter: version, Value: 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT 
[INFO] *** End of debug info from resources from generated POM *** 
[INFO] project created from Old (1.x) Archetype in dir: .../mavenHelloWorld/SortTutorial 
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------- 
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS 
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------- 
[INFO] Total time: 01:27 min 
[INFO] Finished at: 2016-07-24T14:22:36+02:00 
[INFO] Final Memory: 11M/153M 
[INFO] -----------------------------------------------------------

You can take look at the following generated directory structure:

You can also see that it generated the following three files:

• SortTutorial/pom.xml that contains the Project Object Model
• SortTutorial/src/main/java/packt/java9/by/example/App.java that contains a HelloWorld sample application
• SortTutorial/src/test/java/packt/java9/by/example/AppTest.java that contains a unit test skeleton utilizing the junit4 library

We will discuss unit tests in the next chapter. For now, we will focus on the sorting application. As Maven was so kind and generated a sample class for the app, we can compile and run it without actual coding, just to see how we can build the project using Maven. Change the default directory to SortTutorial issuing cd SortTutorial and issue the following command:

    $ mvn package

We will get the following output:

Maven fires up, compiles, and packages the project automatically. If not, please read the next info box.

Now, you can start the code using the following command:

    $ java -cp target/SortTutorial-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar packt.java9.by.example.App

You can see the result of a sample run in the following picture: