title: A tree view approach to maven project with many modules (Netbeans)
body: <p>I'm working on a project where the parent pom has many modules. Some modules are DAOs, some services, some APIs, some this, some that. It has become cumbersome to navigate everything in an IDE. </p>
  
  <p>In Netbeans (and Eclipse, for that matter), the left side of the screens appears like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Modules
   |- Module 1
   |- Module 2
   |- ...
   |- ...
   |- Module N
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This isn't a problem when dealing with 5 or even 10 modules, but when there are more like 50+ modules, its difficult to eyeball the list and find what I am looking for.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to be able to organize things something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Modules
   - -- Services
        |-- service foo
        |-- service bar
   + -- | DAO
   | -- |Something else
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So what I want is to be able to just look for some kind of module group (for example "Rest services") and show all modules that are tagged as that type of module (without changing how the project actually builds). </p>
  
  <p>Based on what little I've found, it appears that there is no straightforward way to achieve what I'm looking for (either in Maven or in the IDE).</p>
  
  <p>Any advice greatly appreciated.</p>