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ApacheCon Maven Meetup: Eclipse IAM and Maven Release plugin

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Tools like Maven should make life easier for a developer, but it can be even easier. Maven is mainly a command line tool, but most developers use some kind of IDE like Eclipse to speed up development. With Eclipse IAM, Maven gets integrated into Eclipse so you don’t need to remember all commands anymore. Some love command line tools, others like to click, walk through wizards and fill in forms. If you want, you can create the whole pom.xml using a form instead of typing the XML. With Eclipse IAM you can integrate Maven goals into your Eclipse build, search for dependencies in repositories and get a graph of all dependencies of your project.

Another useful tool is the Maven release plug in. For older Maven projects I have to manually change the version number, create a tag, deploy the dependency in our Maven repository and set the version number to a higher version. It isn’t that bad if you don’t use sub projects but still a lot of manual work. It becomes worse when you have to change version numbers of all sub projects, release them etc. The release plugin does this for you, so there’s more time for the real fun.