Having spent a bunch of time looking at various build systems and tools, one of the simplest and most effective improvements I’ve discovered is to always use the Maven project structure. It doesn’t matter if you’re not using Maven, there’s no downside to using it and every build tool that uses convention over configuration uses the Maven structure.

Previously I’ve been of the opinion that the directory structure really didn’t matter much – I went with whatever happened to be auto-generated by whatever tool I was using that day. There is a small overhead in remembering to look for the JavaSource directory instead of src or source when you switch projects but it’s incredibly minimal and not worth worrying about on its own. When it comes to build scripts, getting these basics in the same place saves a whole lot of configuration and makes everything simpler.

When you start using sub-modules within the project it really becomes clear just how much time you can waste tweaking bits of build script to work with even slightly different directory structures. Not only do many build systems give you more functionality automatically, you suddenly get the ability to re-use build scripts and templates across different modules and across projects.

Don’t think that using the Maven directory structure means you have to play by all the Maven rules though. You can still generate more than one artifact from a project if that suits you best, you can check jar files into source control rather than using a repository etc, but source files go in src/main/java (or scala or groovy or webapp etc) and test files go in src/test/java (or scala or groovy etc).

Simple,quick and easy to switch to1{#footlink1:1262804739903.footnote} and saves a surprising amount of setup work in your build scripts – especially when you first get the project up and running.

1 – assuming your current build scripts aren’t completely sadistic ↩