Using the archetype is the simpliest way to get a clean, ready for development GWT application. It is comparable to the application created by SDK webAppCreator with the ''-maven'' option, with some tweaks to nicelly integrate with Google Eclipse and M2Eclipse plugins.
Use it as you would any other Maven archetype to create a template/stub project.
mvn archetype:generate \ -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo \ -DarchetypeArtifactId=gwt-maven-plugin \ -DarchetypeVersion=2.8.1
The generated project can then be imported as "existing project" into Eclipse, or if you don't like Eclipse you can use another IDE and run command-line maven to launch GWT hoste mode with ''mvn gwt:run''.
Note: don't run mvn archetype:create as the plugin uses archetype 2.0 descriptor.