Build Eclipse RCP products using Maven 2 - how hard can it be?

I am working as part of a project team developing a suite of applications that use Eclipse RCP as their platform. We are also using CruiseControl for continuous integration and testing. We currently build Eclipse RCP products, features and fragments using Eclipse PDE, partly because of its OSGI support. We would like to move to using Maven 2 in order to match the way we build all our Eclipse plugins and Java libraries. This will make it straightforward to generate comprehensive documentation on the Web, stay in control of dependencies, link into our bug tracking and progress tracking system and so on.

A parallel initiative is my attempt to set up the Eclipse development environment for each team member so that Maven builds and Eclipse builds work seamlessly together on the workstation. Initially I thought that this would require the use of the Maven 2 Integration for Eclipse plugin. However, it turned out that even this is not nearly as closely integrated into Eclipse as Ralf Quebbemann's equivalent Maven 2 Integration is integrated into IntelliJ IDEA, for example. We found it easiest to configure various Maven goals as "external tools" in Eclipse's Run menu and to use the Maven eclipse plugin to generate or update the Eclipse classpath and project files (mvn eclipse:eclipse).

[Footnote: mvn eclipse:configure-workspace works during installation, but only if the configured Maven repositories are online, which rather defeated my objective of creating a standalone developer kit installer. I found that this goal simply inserts a definition of the M2_REPO classpath variable into one of Eclipse's metadata files, so I made the installer do that directly instead. It now runs much faster too.]

Despite the existence of the book Better Builds with Maven, a common complaint about Maven 2 is that it is not sufficiently well documented for heavy-duty use. The book was last updated in August 2007, since when two further releases of Maven have come out. The book doesn't mention Eclipse RCP or PDE. In trying to marry the use of Maven with Eclipse, we are very much having to hoe our own furrow.

I'm using this blog to record the approaches we take and how we fare. Hopefully after a few weeks (not too many!) it will be possible to summarise all the findings into a "how to" for future reference.

My current understanding is that the most promising approach would be using a combination of the maven-eclipse-plugin (with the PDE property set to true) and the pde-maven-plugin. These allow us to create the Eclipse project and classpath files slightly differently in order to permit "headless" PDE builds to take place. As I understand it, the PDE Maven plugin generates an Ant build file that can then be used to run the headless PDE build. There are a few wrinkles; for example we may have to obtain a more recent snapshot of the pde-maven-plugin because the last official release doesn't appear to work with Europa.

One project which does appear to have been successful in building RCP products using Maven is jLibrary, an open source document management / content management system. Martin Perez and Ryszard Petrowski have documented their build approach for jLibrary 1.2. I intend to study this and learn from it. More anon!