> i want to write an eclipse plugin in order to integrate maven > into eclipse ide.
First thing, as a note to people reading this: he is .not. talking about Maven's existing plugin to support Eclipse. He is talking about a plugin for Eclipse to support Maven. > im new to maven and so i dont know yet all > what we can get from it. that's why i'd appreciate if you could > tell me what functionnalities you would like to see in that > plugin. First of all, check out the project on SourceForge dedicated to this already (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mevenide). It hasn't really started in earnest yet. > some ideas after quick thinking and quick discussion with mvdb : > * add a maven project nature Yes. Make sure that there are "types" of projects, including one for web applications (e.g. WEB-INF directory, etc.). One thing to worry about as well: in a Maven eclipse project, do you want the project's compile system to use Eclipse's compile system or .always. use Maven to build? I've found that Maven is distractingly slow when doing debug-fix-debug type work, so I tend to use both Eclipse's main build system as well as Maven, just not for the same things. (My setup would be perfect it Eclipse allowed build targets to be outside of the project directory, so I could build directly into the application server's deploy directory when debugging, but that's another issue.) > * edit project.xml Less important to me. The XML editor works fine for this. > * specify and run goals (like tasks in ant plugin) This is the most important thing. I think the way Ant is currently integrated is the perfect model for how the UI should work with one exception*. While you can invoke Maven via Ant already in eclipse, the output doesn't work correctly (it doesn't output while the script is running, but rather dumps the entire output when the script is complete). Also, it would be .very. nice if Maven could be preloaded or something to make its long startup time (about 10 to 15 seconds at the moment) less irritating. (The real fix to this, really, should be in Maven itself, but that's another topic.) > * manage dependencies (is not that already done with maven > eclipse plugin ?) This is already done with Maven's Eclipse plugin, but it doesn't work that well. It is great for initially generating the file, but if you make changes to the project file (by, say, adding an External Tools Builder to invoke a maven task) or the .classpath file (by, say, changing the target away from the Maven's Eclipse plugin's stupid, unchangable default), you're stuck because the Maven's Eclipse plugin will blow away those changes if re-run. So, incremental management of these files would be helpful. For example, detection if the project.xml file changed and automatic adjustment of the project file would be exremely cool. One other thing: One of the issues with Maven is that it gives you almost too many build goals by default. For example, if you run Maven's Eclipse plugin goal to generate external tools, you get this huge list, most of which you don't want. Figuring out a way to make this more managable would be good. Wordman *One thing I liked about the way Forte integrated Ant is that when double-clicking an Ant file, rather than opening the file, the default target of the Ant file would be executed. This was really useful, as once a project gets going, you want to run Ant files more than edit them. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
