Ok cool. We use Maven quite extensively actually. You're right that the userguide doesn't talk a lot about this, but our projects and builds are fully Mavenized.
Oh yes, I see now the project structure from your source repository: good for you 🙂
Anyway, I did the maven-ization of samples because I was looking for an handle about how to start using Activiti in my Maven project (something like an archetype, perhaps?). Is there any documentation around about this?
Is there any way to get the management webapp as maven dependency: I would like to do some overlay, if possible.
How to setup Activiti projects is discussed in my Activiti in Action book. The examples can be found in the following Google code repo: http://code.google.com/p/activitiinaction/. The Activiti Explorer is not available in a Maven repo. We talked about this within the team, but the best way to make some changes is to take your copy of the Activiti Explorer source code and go ahead.