One of the great feature of maven is the ability to configure automatically your favorite IDE for the project: it configures the classpath, the source directories, the build path and more. After having invoked the ide plugin, you can start coding right the way! However, an area is lacking of support: source integration support. There is no standard way currently in maven one to retrieve the java source code from some repository and include them to your IDE. I suppose everyone will admit that it is easier to debug code when source code is available, same for Javadoc.

In order to improve the situation, I have implemented the maven one source plugin which provides goals to install and deploy java source code archive to the repository. The plugin is based on the standard ant path maven.compile.src.set containing the list of directories involved in the build: the main source directory of course but also directories containing generated code (castor, xdoclet, whatever).

If you want to use the plugin, you need to build it yourself from the maven one plugins sandbox.

I hope this is a start of a better source integration in maven one. We will start upgrading IDE plugins to use this new feature. I’ll keep you posted.