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Maven founder proposes Eclipse marriage

Membership has its advantages

The team that founded Apache's Maven project has joined Eclipse to marry their popular framework and repository with the Eclipse platform and projects.

Engineers from Sonatype, the corporate backers of Maven, have also joined the Eclipse board, where they'll play a part in the open-source group's architectural direction. Sonatype has become a strategic member.

Jason van Zyl, Apache Maven founder and also founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, told The Reg he'd lobby for his Java build-and-release framework and repository to be integrated with the next version of Eclipse, due in just under a year. The idea is for Sonatype's Maven plug in for Eclipse, M2Eclipse, to ship with Eclipse 3.5 - a first version of M2Eclipse is due by the end of September.

Integration will mean working with more than 20 other Eclipse projects, judging by past years' Eclipse releases - Europa and Ganymede.

Van Zyl said efforts to integrate Maven and the Eclipse Web Tools Project and AspectJ are getting the biggest interest from those in the community. Also, he's looking towards integration between Eclipse's OSGi-based runtime project, Equinox.

Sonatype will put OSGi-based Ganymede bundles in the Maven central repository in the "near future", according to van Zyl. Further out, Sonatype plans tools making it possible to search for OSGi components inside Maven and to consume them.

The Maven repository is home to 57,000 artifacts and 2,000 projects spanning SourceForge, Apache, Eclipse and ObjectWeb. There are already some OSGi components, but van Zyl's goal is for Maven to provide the main, public repository infrastructure that's currently missing for OSGi components.

Van Zyl also hopes Maven can become part of Eclipse's Dash project for building new versions of the Eclipse platform.

"Being part of Eclipse and the build and release team will help us create coherence between Maven and Eclipse," van Zyl said. "Our prime goal is to get Maven married with Eclipse and OSGi."®

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