Maven - 'all' or 'parent' project for aggregation?

Question

For educational purposes I have set up a project layout like so (flat in order to suite eclipse better):

-product
 |
 |-parent
 |-core
 |-opt
 |-all
<         


        

Answer 1

Flattened trees are not often used anymore. This was done several years ago to deal with how Eclipse handled projects and the lack of good Maven and Eclipse integration. If you use m2eclipse to import Maven projects into Eclipse, you won't have any problems with a maven-typical nested tree.

As far as what is a good example of how to structure a Maven build? The Maven project source itself. It has all the pieces you desire, including the final assembly that packages up the bundles.

The typical nested structure has a top down hierarchy where the parent is doing the aggregation of the modules below it, and the children are inheriting values from the parent. Although these can and sometimes are separate, this is not the norm.