I love Maven 2 in some quite unnatural ways, hell I named my boat ‘Pom’, and I can wax lyrical about its finer qualities until the cows come home and then some. There are some bits that vex me, such as the lack of decent complementary tools, especially for Eclipse under OS X.
Well I fancied having a fumble under Eclipse this week and after a read of ‘Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins’ by Eric Clayberg and Dan Ruebel (I highly recommend it) I decided to knock up a very simple Maven 2 Plug-in to alleviate my Maven 2 development.
You can find the first draft of this Plug-in here (includes source). Pop this jar into your {eclipse}/plugins/ directory and restart Eclipse and hey-presto you have Maveniser installed. All it does at present is launch 5 popular Maven 2 Tasks (Clean, Install, Deploy, Site and Site Deploy) by right mouse-clicking on your chosen ‘pom.xml’ and choose the Maveniser option followed by the task of your choice.
You do have to set the Maven 2 Bin directory before you can run anything, this is done the same as any Eclipse preference, via the ‘Window > Preferences…’ menu bar option. In the top level options you will find ‘Maveniser’, select this and then specify the directory’s location and away you go.
I want to add to this as time goes by, I personally would love a Pom creation wizard. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to join in with the development, please let me know.