In the ongoing work being done on Maven documentation support for NetBeans Platform developers, the tutorial describing how to use the Maven command line to set up and develop applications on the NetBeans Platform has ben updated:

http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-maven-commandline.html

An interesting next step after following the tutorial above is to... open the result into the free community edition of IntelliJ IDEA:

It's not hard to register the JDK and Maven in IntelliJ IDEA and to then run your application directly from there. The point is that there's no requirement to use NetBeans IDE if you want to create applications on top of its framework.