q4e

I hate maven. The UI sucks so badly, it’s incredibly painful to use. Anything that can take the edge off this has to be a good thing. In the past, I’ve experimented with m2eclipse, but to be quite frank, it’s not much improvement over the command line. And the tools are why we use Java instead of Perl/Python/Ruby, right?

So now I’m trying out q4e, which is being promoted as the “official” maven integration for Eclipse. At some point. Hopefully.

After installing (0.4.0), first impressions are good. There’s a “new maven project” wizard, which knows about archetypes. Creating archetypes manually is incredibly annoying (I can never remember how). Now, the wizard just lists them for you:

Afterwards, it nicely prompts you for details like groupId and artifactId. Plus a description, which I’d never have thought of otherwise. The more metadata the better! (Actually, the description appears to vanish once the project has been created).

Once created, this is what you end up with.

Nice and simple so far. Most of the maven commands are on the right-click menu:

When you run something, you get a log viewer, which is a little nicer than the m2eclipse console. At least it’s timestamped.

Unfortunately, the dependency management appears to be broken. I can’t search for dependencies in the way I could in m2eclipse. That’s not good, as there are lots of them available and the computer should be telling me what the heck they are.

Annoyingly, it seemed to “lose” my src/main/java folder. I had to recreate it in order to get it to work. Very odd.

It will graph dependencies, which is probably more useful on a larger project than my test app.

There’s no help yet, which is annoying, though not critical (I don’t know anyone who uses Eclipse help much anyway. Developers—who’d believe it, eh?)

The one thing that’s been really bugging me with maven is the complete inability to get at the source code of dependencies. Oh sure, it’s available for download, and there are features to ask for the source to be downloaded. But I have no idea how on earth to make it work. Not having source code is a real problem when it comes to understanding software.

It didn’t offer much help in the way of creating tests (A default src/test/java would have been nice).

Overall, it’s pretty clear that this is a very early stage of development. But it still looks more promising than m2eclipse, and anything that can make maven easier to use is most welcome.

That was all written last night. This morning, I’ve updated to the development build (0.5.0). It’s managed to grow a “Fetch Source JARs” command, which is great. Unfortunately, I’ve just bumped into issue 153—the compiler settings aren’t synced between maven and eclipse. Oh well. I stand by the previous paragraph. This has potential, but it’s not there yet.