title: Can you refactor Maven pom.xml files into reusable XML fragments?
body: <p>In Maven, is it possible to refactor commonly repeated fragments into a reusable "library" (plugin)? I realize that I can write my own plugins, but often the functionality I want to re-use is already expressed as fragments in a pom.xml, and my natural inclination is that the mechanism of re-use should preserve those fragments <em>as</em> XML.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Case in point</strong> I've been using a procedure (<a href="http://wikis.sun.com/display/Jersey/HowToConfigureExtendedWADL" rel="noreferrer">partly described here</a>) for generating a WADL file from Jersey/JAX-RS source code, and then generating developer documentation from that WADL and the source-code's own Javadoc. The procedure on that page describes the execution of two plugins, and I am using a third plugin (org.codehaus.mojo:exec-xsltproc) and my own XSL file to turn the WADL into HTML.</p>
  
  <p>I've used this procedure in several Maven projects. The boilerplate comes in at <a href="http://pastie.org/1880764" rel="noreferrer">100 lines of XML</a>. What changes between projects is simply the package name of the source code in question (<code>com.example.myapp.rest</code> in the linked boilerplate). Therefore it is not possible to move this into a parent pom, or any other mechanism that does not allow parametrization.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What I want</strong> is to aggregate, template-out, or otherwise refactor those 100 lines (and one XST file) into a common location. I realize that re-usable maven executions are delivered via Maven plugins. Ideally I wouldn't have to write any Java (or Groovy) just to re-express what I have already expressed in XML.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is it possible to refactor Maven pom.xml files <em>as</em> XML?</strong></p>