Question

I have a spring project and using ANT to compile/deploy my war to Tomcat. So basically it just creates a war file and moves it to tomcat folder.

folder structure is this:

Spring
    -src
        ALL MY SRC (JAVA) files
    -war
        -WEB-INF
            -jsp
            -lib
                ALL MY LIBRARIES
            -properties
            web.xml
            spring-servlet.xml
        -META-INF
build.xml
pom.xml // putting my pom.xml here

With ant I download all my libraries manually. Now as it seems, maven downloads all libraries automatically, thanks to pom.xml. Questions/problems:

1. Must I change my folder structure with maven?
2. Will maven include all downloaded libs to WAR? Is that default?
3. When maven downloads its WARS, can it put all libraries to WEB-INF/lib? How?
4. Does it make sense what I am doing, if no, then why?

Have few questions, because I have never ever used maven.

Answer 1

1. Yes better change the structure, see the maven site. It saves a bit of hassle, should you start using maven-plugins with complex things like using XSLT to generate java sources. Also IDE support might be better. Like:
   src/main/java, src/test/java, src/main/resources.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. Automagically.
4. Yes otherwise you should use Ivy with ant.