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The integration of Maven with integrated development environments such as eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ has long been a non-trivial tasks. Often, the lack of support for Maven for these IDEs is criticized. Such criticism is fueled by the often buggy nature of tooling to support Maven, for instance m2eclipse in eclipse.

However, we might overlook that Maven deals with very non-trivial issues. IDEs can reduce the complexity of a task, however they shouldn't make it more simple than the context of the task dictates.

After a numerous experiments trying to integrate Maven, Eclipse, OSGi, the Eclipse Plug-In Development Environment (eclipse PDE) and Google Web Toolkit, I have developed a number of working templates, which can hopefully make it easier to get started with a serious dependency management approach in eclipse.

These templates all depend on the Maven eclipse plugin, which is Maven-centric, rather than on eclipse tooling such as m2eclipse (which would be eclipse-centric). This is bad in that there is heavy use of the command line but good in that it helps to reduce the dependency of the development on a specific instance and configuration of eclipse.

The following templates are provided on this website: