Migrating complex project from Ant to Maven - How to handle unusual folder structures?

Question

In my new project I am confronted with a complex infrastructure with several modules which have grown over the years in an unpleasant, uncontrolled way.

To come to t

Answer 1

I have done a similar migration in the past, and I had the same doubts you had; however, I went for the "keep the folder structure intact and specify the paths in the POM files" way and I noticed it wasn't as bad as I thought.

What I actually had to do was to appropriately set the and the and maybe add some inclusion and exclusion filters, but in the end I'd say that even if Maven's way is really convention-over-configuration-ish and makes your life easier if you follow its directives on where to place files, it doesn't really make it much harder if you don't.

Besides, something that really helped me when migrating was the possibility to divide the Maven project in modules, which I initially used to replicate the Ant structure (i.e. I had one Maven module for each build.xml file) making the first stage of the migration simpler, and then I changed the module aggregation to make it more meaningful and more Maven-like.

Not sure if this does actually make any sense to you, since I didn't have any generated Ant files which I recon may be the biggest issue for you, but I would definitely follow this road again instead of refactoring and moving files everywhere to Mavenize my project structure.