Maven2 for production development

As many Java devs, I regard Maven2 as a great build tool. After accepting sacrifices of "convention over configuration" approach and getting used to usage of plugins (goals), Maven2 speeds up building/testing/deploying a lot. Yet, it's far more potent than simply "define dependencies - build - package" flow. Authors proudly declare M2 to be "software management tool" and I think I could support such statement (in some parts at least).

Particularly, this post is about M2 build profiles. Declared in POM (or global settings.xml file) profiles can alter project build cycle. They can be active by default (see "activeByDefault" node) or activated by -P command-line switch. Profiles offer unique opportunity - creating versions for different deployment environments totally painless! To achieve this, one can define in each profile:

• resources to be included. For example, if each environment has different server count, you can provide different configuration files. Or if servers run different hardware/software, you can for example feed them with different JNI libs.
  
• sources to be complied. This is useful in example when distributing different debug versions (instrumented/pure on QA/production)
  
• Filters! This is one of the simplest and best features. In my case I have to deal with many pre-production environments. Most of them are configured alike,but with different IPs, ports and external services (JNDI, DB pools, RESTs...). But those are properties that can be tokenized and set during filtering, without any additional efforts.
  
• build plugins - but having different build steps for different environments seems a bit crazy :)
  

I should add one useful note - define custom "build env name" property for each profile and include it in final artifact name, just like:

<finalName>${project.artifactId}-${build.env}-${project.version}</finalName>

This will help you maintain ready artifact for your environments.