First, create a new Maven project using the eclipse new project wizard. You can either right click on the project explorer or go from the File menu item, to go to create new project wizard.

In the next screen, select the checkbox for Create a simple project:

Finally, give a group id, artifact id, name and description, leaving other values as default:

Once you click finish, your first Maven project is created.

Important Observations

Some of the quick observations are as below:

pom.xml

There will be a pom file (pom.xml) created with below contents:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.javajee.mavenexamples</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-demo</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>maven-demo</name>
  <description>maven demo</description>
</project>

You can add dependencies to this pom file to get started with developing applications using those dependencies. For example, to work with Spring core, you can simply add the below dependency inside the project element:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>4.2.6.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Folder structure

Maven creates few default folders as per Maven convention:

• src/main/java - All your source code and packages should be created here.

• src/main/resources - All your config and/or property files that need to be present in classpath needs to be placed here.

• src/test/java - All your test class source code and packages should be created here.

• src/test/resources - All your test related config and/or property files that need to be present in classpath needs to be placed here.

Setting java compiler version

By default maven might use a different version of Java than you require. You can set your Java version compliance details in the pom file as:

<build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.5.1</version>
        <configuration>
          <source>1.8</source>
          <target>1.8</target>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>