Now Available: m2eclipse 0.10.0

February 15, 2010
By Brian Fox

3 minute read time

This is the first production release of m2eclipse in more than a year, and it couldn't come sooner. In this release, you'll find that we've separated the update sites. There is now a core update site and an extras update site, which contains optional components. For more details about the installation, please read the installation instructions on the m2eclipse site.

One important note about the 0.10.0 release: you cannot upgrade from 0.9.8 or 0.9.9-dev. You must either uninstall the previous version from your Eclipse installation, or start with a new Eclipse installation. The recommended version of Eclipse for this release is 3.5.1. You can download this eclipse distribution from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. The rest of this post details what is new and noteworthy about the m2eclipse 0.10.0 release.

What's New and Noteworthy in This Release?

• Stability - We've spent the last year working on stability and performance. If you are used to using m2eclipse 0.9.8, you'll notice remarkable performance improvement between these two versions.

• Integrated with Maven 3.0 - This release of m2eclipse includes Maven 3.0-alpha-6+. One of the primary drivers of the Maven 3.0 effort was to implement some of the "guts" of Maven to make it easier to embed within frameworks like the Eclipse IDE. If you are wondering what changes need to be made to your projects to use Maven 3.0, the answer is "none." Maven 3.0 is a revolutionary upgrade that will enable the next generation of development tools, but you don't have to change a thing in your project. It should all work.

  • Compatibility with Maven 3.0 CLI behavior.
  • Major performance improvements compared to 0.9.8.
  • Full support for proxy/mirror/auth configuration as per settings.xml.
  • Note for Maven 2 Users: If you need to configure m2eclipse to use a Maven 2 installation, you can do so in the m2eclipse preferences.

• Maven Project Lifecycle Mapping framework - This framework gives you the ability to customize the Maven plugins and plugin goals which are involved in your development cycle. If you need to configure the Maven Resources plugin to update resources every time your project is built within Eclipse, there is a new tab available in the m2eclipse POM editor.

  • Developed using the new Project Configurator API.
  • Eclipse project configuration and build can be fully customized for project types and individual projects.
  • Implementation of plexus-build-api to allow mojos to participate in eclipse incremental/full builds.
  • Support for modello, plexus metadata, antlr3, build-helper, resources (from site-extras).

• Reimplemented nexus-indexer integration and repositories view - m2eclipse is tightly integrated with the Nexus indexer, and it uses it to quickly locate dependencies and artifacts. This release adds a new Repositories View, which allows you to inspect, modify, and manage the Maven repositories (including your Local Maven Repository) in an easy-to-use interface.

  • m2eclipse now tracks repositories defined in settings.xml and project pom.xml files.
  • New option for disabled, min, or full index details for each Repository.
  • Supports the new Incremental Index Standard.
  • Remote index files are cached in maven local repository and shared between workspaces. Therefore, workspace initialization in m2eclipse is much faster.

• Preliminary Eclipse 3.6 support - While we don't yet recommend the use of Eclipse 3.6, this release does start to add preliminary support for the platform.

Written by Brian Fox
Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, is a Governing Board Member for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a Governing Board Member for the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Cyber and Technology Resilience Experts (CTREX) Panel, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project. Working with OpenSSF, Brian helped create The Open Source Consumption Manifesto, urging organizations to elevate awareness of open source usage. He also chaired efforts to provide official responses to requests for information from the The Office of the National Cybersecurity Directorate (ONCD) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Within the Atlantic Council's Open Source Policy Network, Brian actively helps shape cybersecurity strategy, offering valuable insights on critical documents, such as ONCD's recent National Cyber Security Strategy. Brian has over 20 years of experience driving the vision behind, as well as developing and leading the development of software for organizations ranging from startups to large enterprises. Brian is a frequent speaker at national and regional events including Java User Groups and other security and development-related conferences.