How to build a maven JAX-RS project (to WAR) without web.xml

In the standard way the build process of the JAX-RS maven project will throw an error like:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-war-plugin:2.2:war (default-war) on project rest: Error assembling WAR: webxml attribute is required (or pre-existing WEB-INF/web.xml if executing in update mode)

To run the build properly you simply need to add the following section to the pom.xml:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
    <configuration>
     <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
    </configuration>
</plugin>