Comments on: Maven in Eclipse

By: Sakuraba

Sakuraba — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:15:09 +0000

I tried m2clipse and I was frustrated that I could not do “Right-Click-> Debug”, because m2clipse required me to set up a different eclipse project with some strange debug-settings and then use the Eclipse Remote Debugger and attach that to the VM that ran Eclipse.

Waaay too complicated, although I must say that Maven and its conventions has brought a lot of good things to projects at our shop.

By: Manuel Woelker

Manuel Woelker — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:06:58 +0000

@Tiran: Building Eclipse projects is the topic of my next blog post. Stay tuned!

@Jason: Glad to see your commitment to QA and documentation. Keep up the good work.

@Stephen: I have to admit I made that experience as well on a larger project, but that was mostly due to a absurdly slow network. I’m no maven expert (yet), but I would suggest experimenting with local repository mirrors/managers. That should hopefully give you a bit of a speed boost. If that doesn’t help you might want to consider filing a bug report. Another thing that might go wrong are frequent checks for snapshot updates.

@Chris: Yep, that is still true, but as far as I know only to start maven compiles from within eclipse. Maven uses javac instead of the eclipse compiler. Since I usually have a JDK installed anyway it’s not that big of a deal.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:38:55 +0000

I seem to remember when I tried the m2eclipse plugin a while back, one of the pre-reqs for using it was to run Eclipse using a JDK and not a JRE as it is defaulted to do.
This meant either amending the desktop shortcut or the eclipse.ini file.
I guess that is still the case.

By: Stephen Lara

Stephen Lara — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:02:55 +0000

I do not recommend using m2eclipse for very large projects. It will waste you time refreshing the pom.

By: Jason van Zyl

Jason van Zyl — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:52:07 +0000

@Tiran, thanks for the vote of confidence. We have been doing a ton of work, and it’s simply not development but tons of testing, documentation, and professional QA. It’s not an easy task but I think we’re finally at the point where we have synchronized Maven 3.x trunk with M2Eclipse and we are now in a very fast cycle of pushing fixes through the whole toolchain when we see problems.

By: Tiran Kenja

Tiran Kenja — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:10:10 +0000

Why there are two official eclipse-maven integration projects is beyond me. But m2eclipse is likely to be the better one simply because it is being developed by Sonatype – who are also the main developers of Maven. Specifically they are doing a lot of work on Maven 3 to support better integration with IDEs and that in turn helps getting m2eclipse working better.

The only real problem is that there seems to be no good solutions to do OSGi development with Maven, if you want to use the PDE tools.