Eclipse Maven Integration - m2eclipse 1.6.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Project
Eclipse Maven Integration - m2eclipse
Release

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  • User and Developer Documentation and Wiki are outdated and largely not applicable to m2e 1.0+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