Which is the best Maven Eclipse plugin?

Question

There is two available Eclipse plugins for Maven :

• Eclipse IAM (old name is Q4E)
• m2eclipse

m2eclipse seems to be the oldest but the more robust. Is there any key differences between the two ?

Which one should be chosen for a project starting today and why ?

UPDATE: m2eclipse is moving to eclipse.org and will be included in the Indigo release train (Eclipse 3.7). See m2e at Eclipse: What will this mean for you? and m2eclipse is moving to eclipse.org!. The accepted answer is thus even more correct.

Solution 1

I choose m2eclipse since it is stable and have all that I need. Especially ability to resolve dependencies inside workspace.

I tried the other one some time ago and didn't like it. It was to buggy so I gave up quickly.

Solution 2

The side by side comparison is moved to http://web.archive.org/web/20150526230611/http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Eclipse+Integration

Solution 3

For me as a complete Maven-newbie the m2eclipse plugin worked quite well. We manage around 15 projects with it. The nested Maven projects will be flat in Eclipse (as it does not support nested projects), but all of them were automatically set up the right way, so everything works fine. Up to now I never needed to manually invoke a Maven command, for me using the preconfigured "run as" launch configurations did their job quite well.

For me the quality of m2eclipse can be judged by this simple example: If you run Eclipse on a JRE instead of JDK, m2eclipse shows a warning that some of its features rely on a JDK. Nevertheless it still works on the JRE. And the warning dialog has hyperlinks to the Eclipse documentation about command line arguments and to the "Installed JREs" preferences, so you can easily fix the wrong Java VM.

That said I cannot speak for or against IAM, as I never used it due to the good m2eclipse experience.

Solution 4

m2eclipse is ok (a lot more reliable than it was 1-2 years ago), but m2eclipse extras (which you need for WTP integration - WTP gives you the ability to run a server in the IDE) is a different matter - and not supported by Codehaus. Several times a week you will find that it hasn't copied resources to the appserver, or you get a NPE, or some other problem.

I have not used Eclipse IAM but I discovered this page whilst looking for alternatives to m2e because of these WTP issues. Intellij is calling, I think.

Solution 5

m2eclipse is fine for the small projects. But it has a very poor performance in huge enterprise projects. Even a smallest change in POMs would cause this plugin to "update dependencies" for hours...

Since we switched to IAM, the problem's almost gone. Even if it takes a while for it to cope with the POM changes, it is still like minutes compared to hours (m2e).

Choose:

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

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Comments

[Mike Cornell]

Why? m2eclipse worked fine for me with multi-module war project inside an ear. You may have to turn off resolving from workspace at the parent project...but it works.

[baybora.oren]

If i turn off "Resolve Workspace Artifacts" then i must have to clean all project (eclipse/project/clean) which depends on super pom :( i don't want to do repeat clean process after maven clean, install or etc. Because projects give errors. But if i run it on command prompt nothing happens, everythings going well.

[baybora.oren]

I cant fix it. I can't compile and install super project in m2eclipse, war project gives error like "Access Denied", plugin cant copy or move jar files to war project output path i think, i dont know. So i use m2eclipse plugin in eclipse to make dependency management and etc. I use mvn command prompt to make process on super pom till find solution.

[mglauche]

I'm having exact the oposite experience with 0.10.0, hitting multiple m2eclipse bugs recently, like resources vanishing after a pom edit, update snapshots not working and more

[Suraj Chandran]

@mglauche i am experiencing the same problem, sometimes my entire source directory gets deleted

[Michel]

Yeah I experienced that pain. I must say disabling automatic building in Eclipse helps a lot with that. I think m2eclipse might do a little too much on each build.