Maven2 Eclipse integration

Question

There seem to be two rival Eclipse plugins for integrating with Maven: m2Eclipse and q4e.

Has anyone recently evaluated or used these plugins?
Why would I choose one or the other?

Answer 1

I have been using m2Eclipse for quiet some time now and have found it to be very reliable. I wasn't aware of q4e until I saw this question so I can't recommend one over the other.

Answer 2

My 2cents,

I am using eclipse for some months now with m2eclipse integration. It's easy to use and straight forward. Once you associate your project to maven and update the dependencies using m2eclipse, any change to pom.xml are reflected to entire project, even Java version definition causes it to be compiled in right JRE (if you have it installed, and properly configured into eclipse.)

Another advantage I found is the maven plug-ins are easy to use integrated with eclipse (jetty being my best example, again, properly configured you can easily integrate maven, jetty-plug-in and Eclipse Debugger)

Compilation, packaging and all other maven features are equally easy to use with a couple clicks or shortcuts.

About q4e I have been reading a lot of good stuff about it and seems the next versions will do a lot more than m2eclipse, with a better dependency management and even visual graphs (!) but the general opinion is that m2eclipse is still better than q4e but q4e is getting better each new version and maybe will surpass m2eclipse soon.

Answer 3

Side by side comparison table of three maven plugins.

Answer 4

There is only one point where q4e is actually better: dependency viewer. You could see the dependency tree, manage your dependencies visually and even see them in a graph. But, m2eclipse works in a better way, specially because you can create you own build commands (in the run menu). q4e comes with some predefined commands and I can't find where to define a new one. In other words, m2eclipse is more friendly to the maven way.

Kind Regards