m2e 1.1 has been released as part of Eclipse Juno release this week. If you haven’t heard about Eclipse Juno, you should take a look. Eclipse 4.2 IDE for Java Developers includes m2e by default. If you use Maven and Nexus, download Eclipse 4.2 today.

Noteworthy in this version:

• A new embedded Maven runtime based on the latest released Maven version 3.0.4,
• Significantly improved “convert to maven project” implementation
• ….and many other fixes and improvements. You can find complete list of changes in this release in Eclipse’s Issue Tracker.

m2e 1.1 is already included in “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” package available from http://eclipse.org/downloads/ or it can be installed from the Eclipse Juno release repository. Eclipse 3.7/Indigo users can install the new version from the m2e release repository

EclipseCon is the conference for anyone involved in Eclipse. As a proud member of the Eclipse Foundation, Sonatype is looking forward to another year of great talks, tutorials and BOF’s. We will be hosting a number of extended workshops as well as talks in the Cypress Room all day on Tuesday, March 22, 2011.

Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl will be giving a presentation on Next Generation Development Infrastructure with Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus & Hudson.

Presentation details:

All development organizations eventually converge on a set of tools to reduce costs, lower onboarding time, and leverage knowledge in strong communities to create standard processes. To this end we see in many organizations the emergence of a standard development stack consisting of Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus & Hudson. In this talk, Jason van Zyl, Founder of the Apache Maven project, will discuss the future of Maven and specifically Maven 3.x, the rapidly approaching m2eclipse 1.0 release, the recent Nexus 1.9 release and roadmap, and emerging tools such as Maven Shell and Polyglot Maven. Sonatype itself leverages this stack on a daily basis and this discussion will focus not only on the tools individually, but how they can work together to create a best practices approach to building and delivering your software in your organization.

Event details:

• Date: March 21-24, 2011
• Location: Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, CA
• Event website: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/

Stay tuned to the Sonatype blog for updates on Sonatype’s talks and presentations at EclipseCon 2011. And for the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter @SonatypeCM.

Sonatype Professional is a suite of next generation development infrastructure software that extends the Maven ecosystem to improve both the speed and quality of Java development projects. Sonatype Professional integrates the m2eclipse, Nexus Professional, and Hudson-based continuous integration and adds unique developer onboarding functionality to get you productive fast.

Attend our webinar – Improving Developer Productivity with Sonatype Professional – to learn how this suite can help transform your software development process.

Webinar details:

• Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011
• Time: 1:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (New York, GMT-05:00)
• Presenter: Blaine Mincey, Sonatype Senior Systems Engineer
• Register today!

For the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter!

The screenshot below shows options that are available to you by hovering over on an expression in the m2eclipse POM XML Editor.

When hovering your mouse on top of a managed dependency, we show the currently resolved version of the artifact (dependency or plugin) and also where the artifact is managed (the model’s coordinates).

Invoking a hyperlink on the managed artifact gives you some new options as well. If the location is in another pom.xml file, that POM file is opened for you, and the cursor is placed at the location of the artifact’s definition.

Next to the preexisting option to open the artifact’s POM, you can now also navigate to the location where the artifact is managed. Let’s see where it leads us.

As you can see the artifact’s managed location is using an expression for declaring the version. Here you can again hover your mouse over the expression to see what it resolves to in the effective POM. To get to the definition of the property, just invoke the hyperlink again (Ctrl-Left Click on most platforms, Cmd-Left Click on MacOSX). See the next screenshot.

After hyperlinking, you reach the definition of the antlr.version property and you can finally change the property value and upgrade your ant-antlr dependency. If you find any issues with this feature or have a great idea for improvement, please don’t hesitate to file an issue in the eclipse.org bugzilla.

These improvements will be available from the Indigo repository at the end of this week as part of the M5 release. If you are adventurous you can try the temporary Hudson build which can be found here.

Today we are releasing m2e 0.12.1. Despite our previous announcement that 0.12.0 would be the last version made available from Sonatype, we have decided to cut this point release to make available new versions of the m2e dependencies.

Most notably, this release includes recently released Maven 3.0.2 embedded runtime and an updated version of Async HTTP Client that resolves all known issues reported against m2e 0.12.0, and thus helps make m2e work better in corporate environments.

As usual this version of m2e is made available from the Eclipse Marketplace and from http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e/.

Enjoy!

Instead of expecting a user to supply these artifacts directly in the XML editor, you now have the option to search for an artifact and let m2eclipse take care of the details. We’ve also made some improvements to the Artifact Search dialog. Screenshots speak as thousands of words though so let’s take a look.

Read the rest of this post to learn more about this new way to insert artifact coordinates in a Maven POM using m2eclipse.

Inserting a dependency using auto-complete

In the POM shown in the previous figure, I have invoked completion within the <project> element. I haven’t started typing anything prior to invoking auto-complete and, as a result, m2eclipse shows me some extra insertion options: “Insert dependency”, “Insert plugin”, and “Insert reference to parent POM”.  In this particular example, I’m inserting a parent element.  Since I have no parent defined in this project, m2eclipse gives me the option to “Insert reference to parent POM” in this auto-complete menu. As a courtesy we will use the current groupId as the initial search term as it is likely that your parent shares the same groupId and we want save you some typing.

The dependency and plugin insertion proposals appear in multiple contexts. Here it’s <project>, but you will encounter them in <depedencyManagement>, <pluginManagement>, <build>, <dependencies>, and so on. If we are in <project> xml element, we will either generate the <build>/<plugins> elements as well (at the chosen location), or if you already have your <build>/<plugins> subelements defined, we will append the plugin definition there.

Support for managed versions

Child projects can inherit a set of default versions for both plugins and dependencies from parent projects that make use of dependencyManagement and pluginManagement elements. We call the versions defined in these elements “managed versions” – they allow you to specify a global version for any dependency or plugin at the top-level of a large multi-module project. If your dependency/plugin inherits managed versions (in parent POM for example) and you pick the managed version in the selection, we will omit the version element in the child POM.

Let’s take a look at the Selection dialog now, because we made it easier for you to spot and pick the managed versions of your artifacts as well.

We’ve reduced the amount of information shown, so for each dependency/plugin you only get to see the version, type and classifier If you want to see more details, like size or date of creation, just select the appropriate tree in the node.

As you can see the ant-antlr artifacts appear with the lock icon overlay and a decorator text. Both of these attempt to hint that this artifact is being managed in the current effective pom. Note: effective pom is only calculated when the pom file is saved. So any unsaved changes will not be taken into account.

To make it really easy for you to pick the managed artifact, the top node (ant ant-antlr) represents the managed version in this case (otherwise it’s the latest version). So you don’t have to drill down to the list of version to select the managed one. Just go with the artifact’s top node.

If you find any issues with this feature or have a great idea for improvement, please don’t hesitate to file an issue in the eclipse.org bugzilla.   We look forward to your feedback.

Learn best practices, central concepts, and complete integration for Maven, Nexus Professional, and m2eclipse. Sonatype books offer the latest content for the software development tools you depend on.

The fourth book in our series of books available for downloading is Developing with Eclipse and Maven.

In this book you will learn how to fully integrate Maven with Eclipse, the world’s most widely used IDE for Java development.

Why Maven?

Maven is a software build tool, but it is much more than that. Maven is also a project management tool. It is designed to be flexible, easy, and intuitive – to be a more efficient and comprehensive build tool.

Why Eclipse?

Eclipse is the most widely used IDE for Java development today. Eclipse has a huge amount of plugins and an innumerable amount of organizations developing their own software on top of it. Quite simply, Eclipse is ubiquitous. The m2eclipse project provides full integration for Maven within the Eclipse IDE.

Sonatype Professional is tightly integrated with the Eclipse development environment to streamline builds, artifact search and reuse, defect detection, and bug fixes. From within Eclipse, users can:

• Visually manage Maven
• Browse and search Nexus repositories
• Submit Hudson continuous integration jobs
• Receive real-time build and continuous integration alerts
• Jump quickly to broken code

To learn more click here.

At this point, the move has not been completed as we are still working with the Eclipse IP team to get all our code and dependencies reviewed. If all goes well, we are hoping to have everything moved to the Eclipse Foundation by mid-December. In the meantime the development is still happening on github but under the new org.eclipse.m2e name-space. We will keep you posted when the code has been completed moved.

The NYJavaSIG is a technical community comprised of Java software engineers, Java application designers, technical managers and new media Java developers that have a common interest in all aspects of Java Technology. They currently have over 6,500 members and meet once a month.

van Zyl will be giving a presentation on Next Generation Development Infrastructure with Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus and Hudson.

Event details:

• Location: Credit Suisse – 11 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 
• Date: November 18, 2010 
• Time: 6:30pm-8:30pm
• Event Website: http://www.javasig.com/meeting/show/35