I have finally got around to putting the Mavan Java EE 6 Archetypes into the Maven Central Repository. This means you no longer have to manually download and install the Archetypes, they should be available for you to use out of the box. In some cases, depending on how you are creating your projects, you may need to refresh or update your Repository indexes in the IDE before they are visible.

In Eclipse (with m2Eclipse installed), you open the Maven Repositories view, locate the Central Repository in the global repositories, and right click and select update index to make the archetypes available.

To create a new project from the command line, you can copy the following command into a script or batch file and edit it to setup your own group and archetype values.

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.fluttercode.knappsack -DarchetypeArtifactId=jee6-sandbox-demo-archetype -DinteractiveMode=false -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.4 -DgroupId=org.application -DartifactId=sandboxdemo -Dpackage=org.application

The new version includes the archetypes for creating Java EE 6 applications in servlet containers which lets you play around with CDI, JSF, JPA, validation and other JEE 6 technologies using an embedded servlet container from the command line.