Maven IDE: The year of Maven & Eclipse

January 10th, 2011 By Jason van Zyl

There are many things we would like to see accomplished in the Apache Maven ecosystem in 2011 but one of the most important, we feel, is the sound integration of Maven with Eclipse. A great deal of effort was spent bringing Maven 3.x up to the level where it can be leveraged for an effective integration with Eclipse. With Maven 3.0 released in 2010 we are in a position to focus on the Eclipse side of the equation. For those you who watch the M2Eclipse JIRA you can see a great deal of activity and that’s because Sonatype’s M2Eclipse team is doing for M2Eclipse what Sonatype’s Maven team did for Maven 3.0. Sonatype is working on the internal architecture of M2Eclipse, adding tests, and preparing the path forward which means the integration of Maven with the rest of the Eclipse ecosystem.
Sonatype is investing heavily to ensure the baseline M2Eclipse 1.0 is of high quality, stable, and maintainable. With the help of the amazing IP team at the Eclipse Foundation M2Eclipse has passed its initial IP review, has entered the parallel IP process and is slated to be released as part of the 2011 Indigo release of Eclipse. To be certain, this will be a great milestone for the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems: users have been asking for years to have good Maven integration included in the standard Eclipse distributions and this will be the year they get it. Indigo will ship this year on June 22nd, but in the meantime Sonatype will be working on and soon releasing Maven IDE!

What is Maven IDE exactly? Maven IDE is a Maven-focused distribution of Eclipse that will consist of a base Eclipse distribution, M2Eclipse and a series of Maven-focused integrations where there is strong support within the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems. What are some of the things we are looking at potentially integrating?

Frameworks and languages

JSR-330 & Guice integration: JSR-330 & Guice are now critical to the Maven ecosystem and very important to Sonatype as a technology. The JSR-330 implementation provided by Guice provides core functionality for Maven 3.x, Nexus, M2Eclipse, and Sonatype’s Maven 3.x integration for Hudson. We will create tooling for JSR-330 to help with our own work, general integration work for development infrastructures, and anyone using JSR-330.
Webapp development tooling: Webapp development is the most requested form of integration and we are still evaluating what’s available in WTP versus making something that is simpler and integrates more tightly with Maven. For those that don’t know, the WTP integration for M2Eclipse is not part of the codebase that moved to Eclipse. Sonatype will be working with the community on the M2Eclipse/WTP integration and will help distribute it from Sonatype, but we are also looking at alternatives to WTP.
Tycho integration: We already have support for Tycho inside Eclipse that allows Tycho projects to interoperate with PDE at a rudimentary level, but we would like to improve this integration and bring support for Tycho-based projects into the Eclipse IDE.
Maven Shell integration: This is where the Maven command line will intersect with the IDE. We see in the future being JSR-330 component based so we can leverage them from the Maven Shell and Maven IDE, and these components will participate in long-lived workflows that aid in the development of applications. We plan to use Drools Flow for the workflow implementation and the Eclipse tooling that exists for Drools Flow. The workflows will be accessible and usable from the Maven Shell as well as from within Maven IDE.
Polyglot Maven integration: For some of the selected grammars and dialects of Polyglot Maven we will provide support in Maven IDE. The folks at Itemis have been a great in helping us understand how Xtext can play a critical role in this regard. If a grammar can be represented in a form that Xtext understands then much of the plumbing for powerful editors can be created automatically using the Xtext framework. There are currently some integration issues between standard Maven and OSGi that need to be resolved but Xtext is an incredibly powerful language workbench. The Itemis guys have really done some incredible work.
Android development tooling: Android is becoming very popular and has a strong Maven contingent. There are sophisticated Maven-based tools for developing Android apps that have been created by Android community: the maven-android-plugin by Hugo Josefson from Jayway, the Eclipse integration exists as part of what Google provides, and Ricardo Gladwell has created the bridge between Maven and Eclipse with his Android M2Eclipse integration.
Scala IDE: Miles Sabin is creating great Eclipse integration for Scala with his Scala IDE project and David Bernard is bridging that work into Maven m2eclipse-scala. We are seeing a lot of demand for Scala integration with Maven.
GWT integration: GWT has rapidly become one of the standard webapp toolkits for Java and we’ve seen a lot of demand for better integration with M2Eclipse. Within the realm of development infrastructure GWT is very popular. Sonar uses GWT, Gerrit uses GWT, XWiki uses GWT, and Sonatype has chosen GWT as the basis of the UI for our Maven 3.x integration in Hudson. GWT will continue to gain momentum so it’s very likely we will have more sophisticated integration with M2Eclipse sooner rather then later.

Development infrastructure

Sonar integration: Sonar is becoming the de facto standard reporting and quality system for Java projects. Sonar is very Maven-centric and SonarSource has provided Eclipse integration that can easily be integrated with Maven IDE.
Hudson integration: Hudson is the de facto standard continuous integration server for Java projects. Sonatype is currently working on finishing our Maven 3.x integration and it will be integrated within Maven IDE.
Wiki editing & site publishing: Sonatype has a wiki page editing and publishing framework called Idiom — that is based on the WikiModel project — that we will be open sourcing, and hopefully merging with the tools that exist in the WikiText project at Eclipse. Ultimately we would like to see WikiModel merged with WikiText and then work together within the community to make great editing tools. If WikiModel could be wed with Xtext it would be amazing.
SVN integration: Obviously important and we initially removed the SVN support to clean up and focus on the core. We’re layering it back in as resources permit. It’s not going anywhere and there are actually two options now. Sonatype supports the Subversive integration which is the official SVN integration at Eclipse, but the community has contributed the Subclipse support. So both variants will be available and Maven IDE will ship with the Java-based SVNKit connector.
Git integration: Git is sweeping over the development community and has taken off like wildfire. At Sonatype we use Git for the vast majority of our projects so great Git integration with Eclilpse and Maven is vital.
Maven Central statistics and metadata: Many OSS projects have been thrilled with the statistics we’ve provided them and we’ll be working in the future to provide more value from the information in Maven Central and deliver it into Maven IDE. Maven Central is an unparalleled source of interesting and useful information for developers and we want to make all that information more accessible.
So you can see that the number of paths we can potentially take are limitless. What will really help us limit our choices are the partners we find who are as committed as we are to the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems. We’re not interested in individuals, groups, or organizations that are hedging their bets with Maven and Eclipse. We are looking for individuals, groups, and organizations who are committed to the Eclipse Platform and Maven as the basis of their development infrastructures.
Things we’ll be looking for in integration partners, are: Tycho build, good test infrastructure, and a composite p2 repository for integration. Maven IDE will first be available in an OSS community edition and will be followed by future commercial versions. We are excited about building out a polished, Maven-focused distribution of Eclipse and we’re really looking for feedback from the community about what integrations to pursue first. So please let us know!
Apache and Apache Maven are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. Maven Central is a service mark of Sonatype, Inc. Nexus, Maven IDE, Maven Shell, and Polyglot Maven are trademarks of Sonatype, Inc. Maven Central, Maven IDE, Maven Shell, and Polyglot Maven are intended to complement Apache Maven and should not be confused with Apache Maven.
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