News

Eclipse 'Lynchpin' for Maven

• By John K. Waters
• July 31, 2008

Eclipse developers will soon have an easier time integrating with Maven, the popular Java open source build framework.

Sonatype, the new commercial Maven company, recently announced that its Maven Integration for Eclipse (m2eclipse) plugin is becoming an Eclipse Technology Project.

The Apache Maven Project is a framework and repository that can be used for building and managing Java-based projects, with a goal of letting the "developer comprehend the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time," according to the project homepage. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), "Maven can manage a project's build, reporting, and documentation from a central piece of information," the homepage said.

Sonatype, which was founded by the engineers behind the Maven project, has joined Eclipse to integrate the Maven framework and repository with Eclipse projects. The link, called m2eclipse, provides tight integration with the Eclipse IDE -- Sonatype bills it as the "lynchpin" between Eclipse and Maven.

Released under the EPL 1.0 license, some of the features of m2eclipse include dependency-management features, new wizards, and the ability to launch Maven builds from within the IDE.

Maven has a devoted following; project managers claim more than 2 million copies downloaded and more than 75 million hits per month to the Maven central repository.

The first version of m2eclipse is due by the end of September, and Zyl said it hopes to see the plugin ship with Eclipse 3.5. (Eclipse 3.4 was released with the Ganymede release train in June.) In the meantime, Mavin Integration for Eclipse is available here.