Wait for it, here come the NetBeans trollz to declare that "Eclipse is dead".

Seriously, though, while I would certainly like more integration between Eclipse and Maven, I imagine this is going to be very unpopular in certain quarters. A lot of people have very strong ideas about which is the One True IDE. I know some IntelliJ fanatics who would drop Maven like a hot cake if there is any suggestion that it is becoming dependent on Eclipse in any way.

This story reads as a piece of crud. Maven's a build system (on steroids)!

Eclipse works with all the other popular build systems, so, wow, it's going to get better Maven support. About time, because the current level of integration is crap.

From the unscientific sample of the open source frameworks I use, they're almost 100% maven-based.

It's interesting that M2Eclipse is going to be included with Eclipse 3.5 because the Google-backed q4e was recently chosen as the official Maven plugin for Eclipse! Maybe they are merging?

I do plugin development, so I wouldn't mind seeing some better build tools for PDE (Eclipse's plugin bit). Anyone who's needed to automate a build of Eclipse plugins knows what I'm talking about. It's painful.

@CTG: why would better integration between Maven and Eclipse bother users of IntelliJ or Netbeans? Currently IntelliJ has better support for Groovy (a Java-based scripting language), but I don't go in the huff and avoid Groovy use in Eclipse.

The previous report on Eclipse and Maven was also a pile of rubbish: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/eclipse_maven_plugin/

Eclipse and Maven striving for the power of Visual Studio! Don't make me laugh. Visual Studio has long been surpassed as the best example of a developer's IDE.

I agree with Steven Dick: a build system is a build system is a build system; it should be independent of the underlying IDE. There's no reason I'd stop using Maven if they strive for stronger integration with Eclipse, *provided* that they don't exclude other IDEs.

If they did, Maven would simply fork and the Eclipse-only version would wither away. It's just too useful to become dependent on Eclipse. One of the reasons I switched from Eclipse to Netbeans was that Eclipse's build process back then required the IDE to be locally installed (don't know if that's still true; probably not) while Netbeans used Ant as its default. In any case, this is definitely a Chicken Little story.

Now for the troll: Has anyone noticed that the quality of Eclipse is inversely proportional to the size of its governance board? Do they really want new members? Software by committee has never been a good idea.

(I'd rather have a "WTF?" icon to display my amazement at this fluff, but the thumbs-down would have to do.)

The Maven repository is a security mess. Eclipse's authenticates plugins and updates.

It would be better for Maven to use Eclipse's update mechanism to download and authenticate packages than for Eclipse to download packages from Maven's global repositories.