Maven is a build tool like make or ant and is used to build QWT applications. It is invoked with the shell command mvn. Maven is bundled into the QWT distribution, you don't have to install it yourself.

To build an application with Maven, you write a pom.xml file that defines the application name, the plugins you need to build it, and the libraries required to run the application. A pom file for an QWT application looks like this.

A pom file may inherit from a parent pom. This is useful to share common settings across applications. Applications generated with mvn qx:new have a pom file with this parent pom definition:

  <parent>
    <groupId>org.qooxdoo</groupId>
    <artifactId>qooxdoo</artifactId>
    <version>2-SNAPSHOT</version>
  </parent>

Feel free to dump this definition or replace it with your own Parent Pom.

CAUTION: Maven's clean plugin version 2.2 always follows symlinks, even if the respective property is explicitly set to false. (TODO: I didn't find a bug report …). If you have your own parent pom, make sure to *not* use this version! Maven would delete your source directory otherwise! No kidding: target/webapps/WEB-INF/src is symlinked to src/main/java and thus will be deleted.