The Netbeans IDE provides two basic view on projects. A logical view and physical view.
The physical Files view follows the structure on the disk and contains all the files in the project filesystem structure.
The logical Projects view displays only the structures considered important by the project type. So basically sources, configurations, tests etc.
Also each project type has a distict icon and each project has a descriptive name of the project. The project type offers many actions in it's popup menu.
Maven projects have a white icon with black M on it. (You you are a graphics person and want to paint a better one consistent with the Netbeans icons, please do so :) )
Maven projects have a separate package view for sources, unit tests and aspect sources, based on the definition in the POM file.
The project's resources are aggregated under the Resources Node. The directory and targetPath is displayed on the resource root node. Based on the include and exclude patterns, the files under the resource root are marked appropriately. (Note: Currently there are no actions to dynamically change the resource definition in this view, but it's on the todo list.)
For projects that are maven plugins, the plugin.jelly and plugin.properties files are shown under Plugin Script node. Projects containing webpages have these also accessible under the it's own node. (EJB, Ear definitions will be accessible in future this way as well.)
At the bottom, there is a link to the documentation. The documentation node has custom popup menu to quickly generate the site. Once generated, the site will appear in your preferred browser.
