21 July 2008

Eclipse and maven 2 integration wars?

...stuck with #mvn eclipse:eclipse? I am. :(

Why can't there be something which just works already? Like my colleagues using IntelliJ has had for a long time now.

First, there is the maven built-in #mvn eclipse:eclipse. Which is probably what one consider "good enough". It's a bit painful when you add a new dependency: have to rebuild/mvn the project in console, then clean the project in eclipse. (often you find yourself having to do this 2-3 times before eclipse finally gets it's classpath shizzle sorted and stops flashing red under your new import statements)

Then along came m2eclipse on the codehaus site. Which hasn't proved itself usable over the years it's been at codehaus. Slow and didn't want to import my large project structures.

Then, Google Code gave birth to Q4E pretty recently (a year ago?), which looked promising and very active for a while. But had my same problem with a lot of artifacts.

Both of these have some cool stuff in them. Like Q4Es grapical dependency viewer, and m2eclipse has a nice artchetype wizard which creates a nice skeleton projects for you if you want a "Hello World" up and running using ex Wicket. But, I can't get either to load my large structure, so I'm stuck with eclipse:eclipse!!

And now? What's going on these days? Seems to me, both of them are trying to get into the eclipse foundation (incubated as they call it) as m2e and Eclipse IAM. So, what I would like to know, from Eclipse Foundation: WTF is going on?

Are we seeing a nother subclipse vs subversive -battle?

I hope not. I hope eclipse.org accepts one of them ASAP, and they both join forces and create a kick-ass plugin.