Eclipse Maven Integration - m2eclipse 1.4.0

1.4.0

Description
  • m2e provides both a framework for building Maven-centric Eclipse tools and a set of tools and user interface elements directly consumable by Eclipse Users.
  • As a framework, m2e provides facilities to import and configure Maven projects in Eclipse workspace as well as APIs that allow m2e extensions to access Maven project metadata and participate in Maven project configuration and workspace build.
  • For the end user, m2e provides
    • wizards to import existing and to create new Maven projects
    • rich form-based and text-based pom.xml file editor
    • launch configuration types to launch Maven build directly from Eclipse IDE
    • access Maven repository index to browse repository contents and in various code-assist
  • JDT integration, both directly useful to endusers and extensible
API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues
  • m2e continues to suffer from lack of proper support for nested workspace projects
  • Lack of support for proper classpath separation between test and main/production source paths in JDT is another long-standing problems that affects m2e.
Non-Code Aspects
  • Localization, Internationalization, Accessibility
    • All m2e strings are externalized, but only English strings are provided.
    • m2e development team did not do any localization and/or accessibility testing due to resource constraints.
  • Active user and development mailing lists as well as #m2eclipse IRC channel at codehaus.
  • User and Developer Documentation and Wiki are outdated and largely not applicable to m2e 1.0+
Usability Details
  • Generic tools for working with Maven projects inside Eclipse workspace
    • Automatic discovery and installation of required m2e extensions based on pom.xml
    • Feature-rich pom.xml editor, error markers and quick-fixes for common problems and best practices
    • Maven launch configuration types
    • Automatic project dependency resolution
  • Support for “plain” Java projects out-of-the box via JDT integration
    • JDT project configuration based on pom.xml
    • Automatic compile classpath management
    • Maven specific classpath in RunAs JavaApplication and JUnitTest
Standards
  • m2e 1.4 is fully compatible with pom.xml format used by Maven 3.0.x, 2.1.x and 2.0.x
  • m2e 1.4 is fully compatible with Maven “default” repository layout and Maven repository Index format
  • m2e 1.4 provides limited support for Maven Archetype descriptor format
Communities
  • Active user community
    • No community activity statistics were collected for m2e 1.4
  • Active developer and adopter communities
  • All project decisions are discussed on m2e-dev mailing list
  • m2e team maintains a number of opensource extensions at Github that are both useful to endusers and as working examples for adopters
  • Close collaboration with Apache Maven; collaboration with m2e/wtp, JBossTools and other opensource projects
This release is part of Kepler