Glossary

Playground

The Playground archetypes configure the base dependencies list and base plugins list.
junit-platform-maven-plugin is used for unit testing.
Playground archetypes are mostly suitable if you want hack a bit, play around, or simply quick start a project.

Advanced

The Advanced archetypes, adds the professional plugins list and the professional profiles list on top of the Playground archetypes.
It introduces integration testing with maven-invoker-plugin, mutation testing with pitest-maven.version, and code coverage with jacoco-maven-plugin. MIT License is included.
Advanced archetypes are more suitable for stable projects, projects that are intended to be shared.

Full

The Full archetypes adds the complete plugins list and the complete profiles list on top of the Advanced archetypes.
It introduces enforcement of the base sources with maven-enforcer-plugin and license-maven-plugin, gpg signing with maven-gpg-plugin, and deploying to Maven Central using maven-release-plugin and nexus-staging-maven-plugin.
The pom elements required for deploying and maintaining a Maven artifact, i.e. developers, issueManagement, scm, and ciManagement, are based on GitHub as a provider, the developer connection is ssh flavourd.
Full archetypes are meant to be used for projects that will eventually get deployed to an artifact repository, i.e. Maven Central.

Modular

The Modular archetypes, identfied by the -mod prefix, are build on top of the above the archetypes, introducing JPMS (jigsaw) to the project, i.e. module-info.java for the main sources, and module-info.test for the test sources.