The new Maven/Eclipse integration - Part 1

Creating a new Maven project in Eclipse

A new and greatly improved version of the Maven 2 Eclipse plugin has just come out. In a series of short articles, I'll be looking at what's new, and how to get the most out of this new version.

In this first installment, we will look at how to create a new Maven project from within Eclipse.

Installing the plugin

You can install the Maven Eclipse Plugin in the usual way, by using the Sonatype update site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update.

Creating a new Maven project

In this new version, the Maven project Wizard has been considerably improved. You can open this wizard by selection "New -> Other" and then opening the "Maven" entry. At this point, you get to choose from four options:

• Check out a project from Subversion
• Create a new Maven project
• Create a new module
• Create a new POM.XML

There are still a few bugs to be ironed out here when using multi-module projects, though. In the current version, for example, the main project that you check out will be correctly configured for Subversion and Maven, but things like JUnit will not work out-of-the-box - you have to configure a new JUnit run configuration for each sub-project. It would be nice if you could use "Run As -> JUnit Test" from the contextual menu in the same way as for any other project.

In the other projects created in the Eclipse environment, on the other hand Maven is configured correctly and you can run your unit tests (and other things) from the contextual menu as you would expect. However, in these secondary projects, Subversion is not configured! A simple "Team -> Share Project" does the trick, but even so, it would be nice if it was automatic.

You can also create a brand new Maven project, using a wizard to define the general project metadata and dependencies. You can select the archetype you want to use from a very complete list of available archetypes, including archetypes from Appfuse, Codehaus, Tapestry, Apache and others. This is very cool - I can never remember the syntax for the mvn:archetype create command.

The third option is to create a module as a child of a parent project. The last option is to create a POM.XML file for an existing project, and lets you enter some basic project metadata and specify the dependencies.

Overall, the m2eclipse team have done a nice job. Although there are still a few minor issues to iron out, it is very promising - you'll never have to write a pom.xml file or run the mvn:archetype command by hand again!

Until next time...

John Smart
Optimizing your software development process
http://www.wakaleo.com | john.smart@wakaleo.com