Since Indigo, the Maven Ecliple plugin formerly known as m2eclipse became part of Eclipse release . The name of the plugin also changed from m2eclipse to m2e. This was not the sole change, however: the number of tabs on the POM has shrinked drastically, and the features as well. This will probably be the subject of a later post since I feel quite cheated by the upgrade.

This week, I was faced with what seemed an near-insuperable problem. I was called by one of my dev: as soon as he upgraded his Eclipse (or more precisely, our own already-configured Eclipse), he couldn’t deploy to Tomcat through WTP. Here are the steps I took to resolve the problem and more general thoughts about upgrading and tooling. The log displayed a ClassNotFoundException, one involving Spring. So, the first step is to look under the hood.

Using an IDE to develop today is necessary but any IDE worth his salt can be enhanced with additional features. NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse have this kind of mechanism. In this article, I will mention the plugins I couldn’t develop without in Eclipse and for each one advocate for it. m2eclipse Maven is my build tool of choice since about 2 years. It adds some very nice features comparing to Ant, mainly the dependencies management, inheritance and variable filtering.