All in all, I’m very pleased.

The m2eclipse plugin is marvelous, finally.

The day has finally come where I’m no longer fighting Eclipse to build projects using Maven, as it should be.  Maven ties far too many niceties of the world together, and to not have it as the underlying, portable build tool within the IDE has always frustrated me.  The ability to quickly start a new Maven project, apply an archetype and go is fantastic.  The fact that it doesn’t require special jazz to get a WTP project up and running is even better.

Hey look, working with my database and some JPA implementation is really easy!

…well, almost easy.  I created a project for my middleware just using the quickstart archetype.  I was just going to throw Spring on top of it and avoid spoiling the good experience so far with EJB insanity.  The next thing I wanted to do was load up my database tables as ORM classes via Hibernate.

For whatever reason, this was cool on my Mac.  Project Properties…JPA Tools…Generate entities.  This is somehow not the way to do it over in windows.  So instead I tried to add JPA as a project facet.

My first problem was that I didn’t have Hibernate set up as my default JPA provider.  Unfortunately, you can only do this through the Maven-managed dependencies.  It has to be an Eclipse user library.  So I download the Entity Manager and wire it up into Eclipse.  Add the Java Facet (somehow not a default, probably Maven’s fault), added the JPA Facet (and am told I need to add the Utility Facet, so I do that).

Further configuration required.

Ok.  So I click into this further configuration and it reasonably wants to know how I connect to the database.  Fair enough.  I do all this, and it still won’t let me apply the change.

Eventually, it appears you need to add the Java project facet first, and then and only then can I reopen the properties page and apply the JPA facet.  A frustration point, but I figured it out.

Hey, nothing special to get a project with the Wicket archetype running in WTP.

I start a separate web project and use the Wicket archetype, interested in tackling what looks to be a nice, lightweight UI package for Java (though it looks like Spring integration isn’t trivial – which is basically unacceptable these days).  I start the project, I add a server configuration, and deploy…

Holy crap, it works out of the box!

I have a ways to go, but things feel more turnkey with Eclipse than I’ve ever experienced.  I did up some JUnits with Mockito, and that was easy, indicating that if I were to set up Cruise or some other CI tool, I could quickly get going with a full Agile project.  Exciting stuff.