What is “pom” packaging in maven?

Question

I was given a maven project to compile and get deployed on a tomcat server. I have never used maven before today, but I have been googling quite a bit. It seems like the top

Answer 1

Packaging of pom is used in projects that aggregate other projects, and in projects whose only useful output is an attached artifact from some plugin. In your case, I'd guess that your top-level pom includes ... to aggregate other directories, and the actual output is the result of one of the other (probably sub-) directories. It will, if coded sensibly for this purpose, have a packaging of war.