The plugin skeleton

In the previous section we commanded Maven to generate a basic plugin skeleton (hpi:create) structure, and then launched our plugin in a local development sandbox by executing the hpi:run goal. Now that the skeleton structure has been created, let's take a look at the contents of the skeleton structure, and learn about the roles that each of these folders will play in our quest for plugin development:

• ./src

• ./target

• ./work

• ./pom.xml

From the folder structure described above we can see there are a number of sub-folders, and a POM file. Lets take a minute to examine each of these in greater detail:

• ./src: This folder contains the source code for the plugin.

• ./target: This folder contains the compiled binary output (*.hpi) and test execution results output.

• ./work: This folder is created when the plugin is installed into the sandbox and contains the extracted Java classes and respective temporary working files.

• pom.xml: This file is the top-level Maven project file, which...