This is not an exhaustive list of every packaging type available for Maven. There are a number of packaging formats available through external projects and plugins: the NAR (native archive) packaging type, the SWF and SWC packaging types for projects that produce Adobe Flash and Flex content, and many others. You can also define a custom packaging type and customize the default lifecycle goals to suit your own project packaging requirements.

To use one of these custom packaging types, you need two things: a plugin which defines the lifecycle for a custom packaging type and a repository which contains this plugin. Some custom packaging types are defined in plugins available from the central Maven repository. Here is an example of a project which references the Israfil Flex plugin and uses a custom packaging type of SWF to produce output from Adobe Flex source.

<project>
  ...
  <packaging>swf</packaging>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>net.israfil.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-flex2-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.4-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <extensions>true</extensions>
        <configuration>
          <debug>true</debug>
          <flexHome>${flex.home}</flexHome>
          <useNetwork>true</useNetwork>
          <main>org/sonatype/mavenbook/Main.mxml</main>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

In Section 11.6, “Plugins and the Maven Lifecycle”, we show you how to create your own packaging type with a customized lifecycle. This example should give you an idea of what you'll need to do to reference a custom packaging type. All you need to do is reference the plugin which supplies the custom packaging type. The Israfil Flex plugin is a third-party Maven plugin hosted at Google Code, for more information about this plugin and how to use Maven to compile Adobe Flex go to http://code.google.com/p/israfil-mojo. This plugin supplies the following lifecycle for the SWF packaging type: