m2eclipse: developing with ServiceMix / FUSE archetypes has never been so easy

Hurrah for Cool Tooling!

Maven archetypes are great: anyone developing with ServiceMix will know and appreciate good archetypes, but will probably grumble disapprovingly at the long command lines they entail. In ServiceMix, the smx-arch command-line short-cut made things easier, but I was always uncomfortable with having to swich from Eclipse to the command-line to create my new projects.

In the last few days, Guillaume Nodet put in a tiny little script onto the FUSE repository (http://repo.open.iona.com/maven2) that generates an archetypes-catalog.xml file containing all the archetypes. You can import this URL into m2eclipse, and then use the really neat m2eclipse dialogs to create your maven/eclipse projects directly from the catalog.

I love it so much I added an entry on the FUSE wiki; go there for more details!