If you want to start with a Java EE web application, you can simply use the maven-archetype-webapp archetype to generate the Maven project skeleton, shown as follows:
$ mvn archetype:generate -B -DgroupId=com.packt.samples -DartifactId=my-webapp -Dpackage=com.packt.samples.webapp -Dversion=1.0.0 -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp -DarchetypeVersion=1.0
The preceding command will produce the following directory structure. One issue here is that it does not have the java directory just after src/main. If you want to add any Java code, you need to make sure that you first create an src/main/java directory and create your Java package under it; otherwise, with the default configuration settings, Maven won't pick your classes for compilation. By...