Geertjan posted a blog post about Netbeans and the wide array of Maven Archetypes this morning, I posted an almost identical post from an Eclipse perspective. This was an entirely unplanned coincidence, but it is a synchronicity that tells me that the usefulness of the archetype plugin is upon us, and that it is triggered by IDE integration.
If you are not already a subscriber to Geertjan's blog, you should subscribe. He's a great communicator, and also very much of the cooperative, open source ethos. Even though we're focused on Eclipse integration at the moment, I get the sense that Netbeans has really started to become an attractive development platform (especially for JRuby). If you think we shuld pay more attention to the Maven Netbeans integration feel free to let us know by leaving a comment on this blog.