Is Developing Maven war apps in MyEclipse worth it?

Question

My organization has made an upper level decision to move to maven as the standard build tool for Java projects. I have been tasked with helping our local teams migrate projects over to maven.

One of the core tools that is in play is the MyEclipse IDE. MyEclipse seems to have had a "fun" history with the maven team as evidenced in various places, especially when dealing with war projects. I haven't encountered problems with simple jar projects...yet.

After fighting with MyEclipse and failing to make it recognize a war project easily, the question becomes, is MyEclipse worth it for developing maven war apps?

If so, is there a way to get MyEclipse to play nicely with a war project that I've not found? Or, am I simply better off suggesting its time to use Eclipse Java EE edition with m2eclipse?

Answer 1

I am working as a tech lead, and we recently started moving to maven. I had a couple of issues getting maven to work with myeclipse. First, even when I "Enabled all m2eclipse features" checkbox, I still couldn't check out a project as a maven project, from subversion. That option (that you get from m2eclipse) just wasn't available.

Also, some of the preferences you get with m2eclipse are not available with maven4myeclipse.

Finally, I couldn't just uninstall the maven4eclipse plugin and install m2eclipse. That would have been an acceptable workaround.

I think Genutec tried to make Maven more accesible to newbies, but there are some problems in the impementation, and I don't see them being fixed soon. For us, that will likely delegate MyEclipse to being just a fancy jsp editor.

Answer 2

No. MyEclipse does not support projects that were created outside of it. It is by design only working with projects created using its wizards.

From the Using Maven in MyEclipse Overview

NOTE: Maven is only supported for new projects. Migration of existing projects to Maven-enabled projects is not supported at this time, but may be considered for a later release. Right now the MyEclipse team is focused on providing as fluid a new-Maven-project experience as possible

Answer 3

Mike,

Sorry to hear you are fighting MyEclipse and Maven, in the past the most common problem I've seen causing people pain in this area is when they don't have the Web Root, Java source dirs or resource dirs set correctly.

Using this webpage as reference for a standard Maven2 web project layout, you can easily create a Maven-enabled MyEclipse Web Project. The steps you would want to take are as follows:

1. File > New > Web Project
2. Give your project a name, use the Java source dir of "src/main/java" and a Web Root of "src/main/webapp", check the Java EE spec level you want, check "Add Maven support" checkbox and hit Finish (unless you want to setup the artifact/group IDs).
3. Now, if this is the first time using Maven4MyEclipse, a lot of initialization will take place preparing your local repository and grabbing all the Java EE resources to build your project, but after that's done you should be all set.
4. You can execute the Maven targets off the Right-click Run As or Debug As menu and even manage custom goal execution using the "Maven build..." shortcut -- this is all similar to m2eclipse.
5. If you decide you want to use m2eclipse complete, you can navigate to Window > Preferences > MyEclipse > Maven4MyEclipse and check the "Enable all m2eclipse features" checkbox.

Out of the box we only hide the bits that can make Maven confusing for first-time folks, if you enable all the m2 bits, you can do whatever you want with Maven and MyEclipse. If you keep having trouble stop by our forums and let us know and we'll help out as best we can.

Answer 4

Mike,

think the issue is that the project has already been created outside of MyEclipse and >worked thru maven using the command line. Importing it is not successful.

I saw this post when looking for other Maven resources so I'll chime in.

Why not import your existing project using File > Import and turn on all the m2eclipse features and continue to develop it as you did before using maven commandline tools? I've done this and it works well for legacy projects, once m2eclipse features are enabled as mentioned in Riyad's #5.

Personally, I've always thought the maven war format was a bust, but we still have some old projects that use it around. Maven's format is just a default (and a poor one), not some sort of standard. However, we currently leave those old projects "as is" (using the above technique) just because it's easy. But for new work we use the MyEclipse web projects then just enable Maven support on them. The benefit is that you get all the Maven support and it's super easy to use and manage but no more commandline (although that still works too) and all the MyEclipse tools work perfectly on them as well. It's a "best of both" approach, well, at least for us. YMMV.

Hope that helps, Dave

Answer 5

Mike,

Interesting, what happens when you have developers who are not using MyEclipse?

Not an issue here; I work for a very large company that has been standardized on it for quite some time (happily, I might add as we used to be a WSAD shop -- shudder.)

Anyway, if you have some that use MyEclipse and some that don't I see two options. First, if you create MyEclipse web projects and then "Add Maven capabilities" (or whatever it's called) to them, they'll work in MyEclipse and from the Maven commandline as well. So even if you're not using MyEclipse you can still use the commandline Maven tools. Also, since the MyEclipse structure is the more standard "exploded war" layout, it should work with whatever else you use as well.

Other thing to consider is that Maven's web layout is simply a default and Maven can easily support any project structure, including the one MyEclipse uses, so you should be able to use the MyEclipse project with Maven in any tool with just a little additional config. That's likely why the Maven commandline tools still work on the MyEclipse Web projects -- the MyEclipse guys just automatically configure Maven to recognize the format.

You also could just import the externally created Maven web projects as I said in my last post. We don't like to do that because that structure is unique to Maven and just doesn't work with any tools except Maven. As a result, it basically defeats the the tool support you get automatically in MyEclipse, Eclipse Java EE, or pretty much any other tool. It's just a poor default. Exploded WAR format, that's used by MyEclipse, Eclipse Java EE, WSAD, RAD, and everyone else is simply a better solution. Especially when it still works with Maven just fine as well.

Maven was made to be flexible to project structure. We've just found by using that flexibility a little you can get Maven support and great tool support too.

Dave