M2E-WTP/New and Noteworthy/0.16

New and Noteworthy in m2e-wtp 0.16.0

m2e-wtp 0.16.0, formerly known as m2eclipse-wtp, is the first official release under the Eclipse.org umbrella.

This release focuses on bug fixes, but also brings some new features to m2e-wtp, mainly to the "Eclipse to Maven Project Conversion" area. The complete changelog is available here.

Pre-Requisites

m2e-wtp requires an Eclipse JavaEE distribution, and can be installed from the releases update site. m2e-wtp is generally compatible with Eclipse Helios (3.6), Eclipse Indigo (3.7) and Juno (3.8, 4.2).

Please note that, m2e-wtp and Sonatype's m2eclipse-wtp overlap and can not be installed together. We've done our best to minimize the pain while updating m2e-wtp over m2eclipse-wtp, but it's far from being perfect. You should know that :

• if you add the m2e-wtp update site to your list of Available Update Sites, doing "Help > Find Updates" should find m2e-wtp as a suitable replacement for m2eclipse-wtp, and everything should update properly.
• if you try to update your Eclipse installation via "Help > Install New Software...", m2e-wtp won't install because of the conflict with m2eclipse-wtp (this is a bug in p2).

The safest path is to uninstall all previous plugins/features depending on m2eclipse-wtp or better yet, start from a fresh Eclipse installation.

m2e 1.1+ (m2e 1.2 is recommended) and the Maven Archiver 0.15.0+ feature from Sonatype are required. They will be automatically discovered and installed if necessary.

Restart your workspace after the installation.

New project conversion participants

Thanks to a new API introduced in m2e 1.1, m2e-wtp can now help you convert existing pure Eclipse JavaEE projects to Maven. Please be aware this conversion process only converts your eclipse project settings to their corresponding maven plugin configuration. (Classpath) dependencies conversion is out of scope of this feature.

In order to convert an existing project to Maven, right click on your project, and select Configure > Convert to Maven... :

A wizard page will open and you will need to fill in some basic maven metadata. The selected packaging will determine how the conversion will be performed :

The projects types for which m2e-wtp provides conversion capabilities are :

• Dynamic Web : select the war packaging
• EJB : select the ejb packaging
• Enterprise Application : select the ear packaging
• Connector : select the rar packaging
• Application Client : select the app-client packaging

m2e natively supports Utility and Web Fragment project conversion (both use the jar packaging).

The wizard will then create a Maven pom.xml matching with your existing Eclipse settings. If the Eclipse settings perfecly match the Maven defaults, then no customization will be performed :

Preferences

Upgrading your workspace from using m2eclipse-wtp to m2e-wtp will work seamlessly when using out-of-the-box settings. However, if you don't use the workspace defaults, you'll need to set your preferences in Window > Preferences > Maven > Java EE Integration :

Similarly, project preferences can be set with a right click on the project, then Properties > Maven > Java EE Integration