What is the best Maven Eclipse plugin?

Question

There are two available Eclipse plugins for Maven:

• Eclipse IAM (old name Q4E)
• m2eclipse

m2eclipse seems the oldest, but more reliable. Are there any key differences between the two?

Which one should you choose for a project starting today and why?

UPDATE: m2eclipse will move to eclipse.org and will be included in the Indigo mailing list (Eclipse 3.7). See m2e in Eclipse: what will this mean for you? and m2eclipse is heading to eclipse.org! . Thus, the accepted answer is even more correct.

Answer 1

I choose m2eclipse because it is stable and has everything I need. Especially the ability to resolve dependencies within the workspace.

I tried another one and I didn’t like it. That was a mistake, so I quickly gave up.

Answer 2

The comparison goes side by side at http://web.archive.org/web/20150526230611/http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Eclipse+Integration

Answer 3

For me, as a full-fledged Maven newbie, the m2eclipse plugin worked fine . We manage about 15 projects. Maven nested projects will be flat in Eclipse (since they do not support nested projects), but they were all automatically configured correctly, so everything works fine. Until now, I have never had to manually launch the Maven command, since the pre-configured “run” as “launch configurations” were used for me, they did their job quite well.

For me, the quality of m2eclipse can be judged by this simple example: if you run Eclipse on the JRE instead of the JDK, then m2eclipse shows a warning that some of its functions rely on the JDK. However, it still runs on the JRE. The warning dialog contains hyperlinks to the Eclipse documentation about the command line arguments and the "Installed JRE" settings, so you can easily fix the wrong Java virtual machine.

This suggests that I cannot speak for or against IAM, as I have never used it because of my good experience with mainlips.

Answer 4

Comparison of side Maven plugins for Eclipse . It has not been updated to recently added features. For example, see the New and Noteworthy Page for m2eclipse.

Answer 5

m2eclipse is fine (much more reliable than it was 1-2 years ago), but the additional m2eclipse applications (which you need for WTP integration - WTP gives you the ability to run the server in the IDE) is another matter - and is not supported by Codehaus. Several times a week, you find that it did not copy resources to the application server, or you get NPE or some other problem.

I did not use the Eclipse IAM, but I found this page looking for alternatives to m2e due to these WTP issues. I think Intellij is calling.

Answer 6

m2eclipse is great for small projects. But it has very low productivity in large corporate projects. Even a small change in the POM will cause this plugin to "update dependencies" for several hours ...

Since we switched to IAM, the problem has almost disappeared. Even if it takes some time to deal with POM changes, it still looks like minutes compared to hours (m2e).

Choose:

• m2e - if your project is small and you like trendy features like dependency trees
• iam - if you need performance

Answer 7

I used m2eclipse. But I never managed to run tests or the whole project from eclipse (the project had subfolders for different submodules). When I used this, they said that the support was experimental. The most I could get was a syntax check and the like. For the rest, I used the console.

I didn’t like it at all.

Answer 8

What about the design of several modules ?, the m2eclipse plugin is inefficient. Especially if we use a military module.

Answer 9

I use m2eclipse ... it is the best and well documented ...