Using Eclipse for multi-module Maven2 projects

I have been diving into a lot of Java and Eclipse recently. We’re setting up a Continuous Integration system at work, using Hudson as the engine. Because sometimes things didn’t went as smooth as I would have liked them to go I decided to write some posts about setting up the system. In this first post we’ll be setting up Eclipse with the necessary plugins. The next post will be about setting up the Maven project in Eclipse and sharing is through Svn (Subversion). I suppose you are already familiar with Eclipse.

The first thing we’ll be doing is installing Java, Eclipse and all the necessary plugins for Eclipse. 

1. Download Java JDK1.6 and install it.
2. Download the EE version of Eclipse. EE stands for Enterprise Edition, so you can also do advanced stuff with it like EJB etc. I took this version because it has WTP, Web Tools Platform, included which is necessary to make web applications). 
3. Now we’ll download some plugins for Eclipse. Plugins are installed via an update URL. Select the Help>Software Updates>Find and Install menu item, and select “Search for new features to install”. Click on “New Remote Site” to add the update url, select the box before the url and click on install. You’ll have to do this for every plugin. 

• Install Subclipse so you’ll have access to your Subversion repository. The update url is http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x, so use this one in Eclipse. After restarting Eclipse you can switch to the SVN Repository Perspective and add a new repository location in the SVN Repositories tab. If you don’t work with Svn then ignore everything I say about it
• We will need the Maven Integration for Eclipse plugin if we want to work with Maven projects in Eclipse. The update URL is http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/. Install the plugin (you can uncheck some of the unnecessary integration options like e.g. AJDT). Eclipse will have to start in a JDK Java environment instead of in a JRE environment to work with the plugin, so if your default Java Runtime is a JRE then you’ll have to add something like

  -vm C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\bin\javaw.exe

  to the eclipse.ini file in your Eclipse folder. 

We have set up the development environment so in the next post we’ll get into setting up a Maven2 (multi-module) project. That’s it for this post!

[part 2]
[part 3]