After years at Codehaus, we're moving to get closer to the eclipse.org projects we work with, like PDE, WTP, and AJDT. We are staying at Codehaus for one more release, but we'll ask everyone to come over once we have everything set up here.
Before we get caught up in details, now is a good time to step back and talk about why we think bringing Maven to Eclipse could be very fruitful. If you see more benefits or potential risks or if you'd like to participate, let's talk about it (see below).
Maven helps Eclipse build, and Eclipse helps people use Maven. With Maven, Eclipse will build more kinds of software projects both in the IDE and on the command-line, e.g., in a process of continuous integration.
The Apache Maven project describes Maven as a "software project management and comprehension tool". Maven is used in thousands of open-source and commercial software projects to simplify building and understanding software of all stripes. Maven is great at doing command-line builds, understanding project structure and relationships, and sharing code in binary repositories. It's easy to write and configure a Maven plug-in for a given build task, and hundreds of plug-ins are available.
The Eclipse IDE is great at supporting interactive software development, with incremental compilation and instant UI access to dependencies and definitions in everything from code to metadata. But command-line builds are hard to configure, libraries are often managed manually, and many languages, programming models, and build processes are not supported by Eclipse as they are by Maven (because it is a much harder problem to write good UI support).
They can help each other out. Eclipse can make it easier to work with Maven, and Maven can make it easier for Eclipse to support complex projects using different programming models. On the Eclipse side, editors make it easy to find and maintain Maven project information, and the Java tools can use the Maven dependencies for compiling, searching, content assist, etc. (even in derived project types like WTP and AJDT). On the Maven side, conventions and software repositories make it easy to manage library dependencies, to assemble projects, and to build from the command-line. Further, those deploying new software tools need only write a Maven plug-in to get simple support for configuring and running the tool in Eclipse. Finally, Eclipse plug-in developers can use Maven under the covers to deploy tools in combination with additional UI support. Bringing Maven to Eclipse helps people write application and development tools in the IDE and on the command line.
Hence, we have something for everyone:
Thanks for listening! If you're interested, there are many ways to participate:
We'll announce when we've moved to the old lists and to m2e-user.
The m2eclipse team
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