I hate maven with an almost homicidal passion. It only works if your brain works like maven, for the rest of us in the real world its just a pain in the arse. But it does have one good idea - it provides a simple, out of the box way of creating a project structure (but so do rails, django and grails in a much better way). I've decided to publish my own example web application project/structure on GitHub - http://github.com/tomcz/example-webapp/tree/master. This is my idea bucket for how to create, configure and code web applications, and gives me a source for downloads when I'm coaching or starting a new project. This release represents some of the ideas that I have either encountered or am experimenting with at any given moment. At the moment I'm concentrating on post-redirect-get, RESTful URLs, robust database connections, Spring 3 and StringTemplate.