Setting up an Eclipse project to build CXF is pretty easy. There are three parts to it:

Required plugins

We use several Eclipse plugins to make building CXF a bit easier

• Checkstyle - we use checkstyle to make sure we have consistent code style as well as to find various types of bugs and other issues. http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update
• PMD - like Checkstyle, we use PMD to find potential programming problems in the code. Point the Eclipse auto-install thing at http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse
• Subversion plugins - there are a couple of these to enable Subversion checkins/checkouts from within eclipse: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x

To install the plugins:

• Go to

  Help -> Software updates -> Find and install
  

• Select "Search for new features to install" and hit Next
• For each of the above plugins, click on "New Remote Site", enter a name and the above URL.
• Select the three new sites and click finish. It will search for the new plugins. Select them all and hit OK.

It will then download them and install them.

Creating a workspace

First check out CXF from Subversion.

To create a workspace, just run from the root directory of the CXF project (see the build page for more detailed information):

> mvn -Pfastinstall
> mvn -Psetup.eclipse  

OR

> mvn install -Pfastinstall -Psetup.eclipse

This creates a new workspace in "../workspace" for use with CXF.

If you don't want the workspace there, you can run:

"mvn -Psetup.eclipse -Declipse.workspace.dir=path/to/workspace"

If you don't want the eclipse projects' output directory to be ./target directory (by default) but ./eclipse-classes, you can run:

"mvn -Psetup.eclipse -Pset.eclipse.output"

What this does is create a workspace and imports our checkstyle rules, the maven 2 repository, code format rules, import order rules, etc... into that workspace. It also goes through each sub-project and creates the .project and .classpath files. This process will take some time. It will down load source jars for most of the dependencies and hook them up in the .classpath file as well. Thus, while coding/debugging, you can trace right into the dependent libraries. While running, you WILL see a bunch of warnings and such flying by. There are a bunch of jars on ibiblio that do NOT have source jars with them. Thus, you will see warning about those. Those warnings are safely ignorable. As long as it says "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" at the end, you should be OK.

Create the project in Eclipse

• In eclipse, switch to the workspace you created above.
• Go To:

  File -> Import....
  

• Select "Existing Projects into Workspace" and hit Next
• Select root directory: enter the path to your trunk directory and hit Next.
• Select all the subprojects and hit Finish. Eclipse will import and rebuild all the subprojects selected. This will take a while.

That's all there is to it. From eclipse, all the unit tests and system tests should be runnable. However, to build kits/jars and stuff, you still need to use the command line "mvn" stuff.

Importing new projects that depend on CXF projects

With the latest version (2.5) of the maven-eclipse-plugin, when you run "mvn eclipse:eclipse" on a project, if it knows where your workspace is, it will see what projects are already defined and wire them in to the new project instead of pointing at the jars in your ~/.m2/repository dir. Thus, debugging is a lot easier. There are two ways to get it to know where your workspace is:

1. Explicitly on the command line. When running eclipse:eclipse, add -Declipse.workspace=/home/dkulp/working/workspace
2. Update your Maven ~/.m2/settings.xml to have a active profile that always sets these variables. Thus, whenever the eclipse plugin looks for it, it know where the workspace is. In settings.xml, do:

   ...
       <activeProfiles>
           <activeProfile>extra</activeProfile>
       </activeProfiles>
       <profiles>
           <profile>
               <id>extra</id>
               <properties>
                   <eclipse.workspace>/home/dkulp/working/workspace</eclipse.workspace>
   
                   <eclipse.workspace.dir>/home/dkulp/working/workspace</eclipse.workspace.dir>
               </properties>
           </profile>
       </profiles>
   ...

   By doing that, you can pretty much run eclipse:eclipse (or -Psetup.eclipse for cxf projects) at any point and it will always wire the new project to depend on the existing projects.

How Does This All Work, Anyway?

If you are wondering about how all this manages to make Eclipse, Maven, Checkstyle, and PMD
cooperate, see Connecting Maven, Eclipse, Checkstyle, and PMD.