Developing with Eclipse and Maven

8.3. Summary

8.3. Summary

m2eclipse is more than just a simple plugin which adds Maven support to Eclipse, it is a comprehensive integration that will make everything from creating new projects to locating third-party dependencies orders of magnitude easier. m2eclipse is the first step toward an IDE that is aware of the rich semantic treasure that is the central Maven repository. As more people come to use m2eclipse, more projects are going to be releasing Maven Archetypes, and more projects are going to see value in publishing source artifacts to the Maven repository. If you've tried to use Eclipse and Maven together without a tool that can comprehend the hierarchical project relationships that are central to any multi-module Maven project, you will know that the ability to work with nested projects is essential to smooth integration between the Eclipse IDE and Maven.