It seems to me that this discussion is based on a false comparison. There are maven plugins, Eclipse plugins, and other IDE plugins. No supernatural force is going to take the configuration data for the maven-checkstyle-plugin and turn it into configuration for the Eclipse checkstyle plugin. Or, to look at it another way, no magic force can render the results of checkstyle (as run inside Maven) into the data that Eclipse would need to add wiggly lines and other markup.
IDEs come in two flavors. IDE's like XCode and NetBeans run some other build tool underneath, so that basic behavior is covered once you configure the underlying build tool. If you stick the checkstyle ant task into your netbeans project's ant file, you will run checkstyle inside netbeans. The results may not be terribly illuminating, but it works. IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio take responsibility for the whole build, so they can't do anything at all unless something maps out even the basic build configuration for them. Some people really hate Eclipse exactly because it is a 'deep' IDE in this sense. We might imagine a sort of ur-API for build tools and plugins, perhaps implemented with some language-neutral data format like json, by which all the build tools and their plugins could interact with IDEs with tight integration. We could imagine it, but it doesn't exist, and it isn't very likely to show up. The maven-eclipse-plugin exists, and works pretty well in many cases. When you want to use a plugin that it has no special knowledge of, you have to script the corresponding eclipse configuration. Apache CXF is an example of just how far you can take this scheme. If you wanted to make it extensible to avoid this, you'd end up in the same place: inviting people to write bits of code to bridge maven plugin and their configuration to Eclipse plugins and their configuration. As the author of some barely non-trivial m2e configuration plugins, I can say from experience that the situation is somewhat rough, and will remain somewhat rough until there is a critical mass of good examples to steal from. Only time will solve this. Heaven help someone who tries to use my code as a good example to steal from. If you really love the old m2eclipse, well, open source is its usual wonderful thing. Go find the source, rename the bundles, and adapt it to the version of Eclipse that you need. As for 'ugh, stuff in my POM' -- aside from Igor's offer to incorporate an alternative, I would point out that over in Maven-land, there's an active discussion of the next generation POM, and one idea in the air is make POMs work like W3C XML schemas: other tools could look for annotations in other XML namespaces to avoid the annoyance of keeping multiple files in sync. If we actually pull this off, m2e could have annotations, and netbeans, and anything else that cared to. No doubt this idea is not to everyone's taste. Me, I'm waiting for the ordinary 'debug-as/java app' to stop mixing in the eclipse test classpath, which, in my experience, has always been the biggest pitfall of combining the two. Or has m2e got that going now and I haven't noticed? _______________________________________________ m2e-users mailing list [email protected] https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/m2e-users
