Eclipse Maven Integration - m2eclipse 1.6.0

1.6.0

Description

m2e 1.6 is a minor release, fixing over 80 bugs. However, a number of significant improvements were introduced since m2e 1.5 :

  • improved performance of project import
  • improved auto-completion in pom.xml editor
  • new embedded maven runtime based on maven 3.3.3
  • new experimental "Auto-update project configuration"
  • new embedded maven archetype plugin 2.3
  • UI and performance improvements in Archetype Wizard 
  • New API to control Project Configurators execution order
  • m2e now honors workspace auto-build
API Certification

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

Architectural Issues
  • Lack of support for proper classpath separation between test and main/production source paths in JDT is a long-standing problem 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
  • User and Developer Documentation and Wiki are outdated and largely not applicable to m2e 1.0+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
    • Wizards to import or create Maven projects
    • Feature-rich pom.xml editor, error markers and quick-fixes for common problems and best practices
    • Maven launch configuration types
    • Automatic project dependency resolution
    • Ability to convert existing projects to Maven
  • 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
End of Life
  • The "secondaryTo" attribute of the org.eclipse.m2e.core.projectConfigurators extension point has been deprecated. m2e 1.6 introduces 2 new attributes to org.eclipse.m2e.core.projectConfigurators :
    • runsAfter : a comma-separated list of configuratorIds a given configurator should run after. ids suffixed with an exclamation mark would be optional. 
    • runsBefore : a comma-separated list of configuratorIds a given configurator should run before. ids suffixed with a star would be required 
  • Projects builds (via Launch Configuration) can no longer be executed with an external Maven 2.x runtime. Only Maven 3.x is supported. 
Standards
  • m2e 1.6 is fully compatible with pom.xml format used by Maven 3.x
  • m2e 1.6 is fully compatible with Maven “default” repository layout and Maven repository Index format
  • m2e 1.6 provides limited support for Maven Archetype descriptor format
Communities
  • Active user community
    • No community activity statistics were collected for m2e 1.6
  • 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 Mars