Sunday, March 6, 2011

Configure Eclipse Projects from Maven with AntRun and XMLTask

Imagine a perfect world of tool usage: Every developer would use the same tools and identical tool configuration. To achieve this smoothly, every setup step should be automated. But when a team uses m2eclipse, the project configuration is not under version control. Instead, files like .project, .classpath and the .settings directory are generated upon checkout. m2eclipse uses definitions from pom.xml to derive the Eclipse configuration. I will introduce an approach how an organization can modify and extend this automatic configuration for its needs. This is the final chapter of a three post series. Last times, I presented how seamless integration of Maven and Eclipse significantly contributes to code quality and why project configurators do not yet accomplish this perfectly.[1],[2]