Question

What do people think is the best way of setting up a Java, maven-2 web project so a new developer can come on board easily?

Do you checkin you project settings, .classpath, .project .settings folder etc into source control and use variables?

Or

Is it better to just checkin code and use the maven eclipse plugin to generate project settings?

Keep in mind these are multi module projects, with different facets so the project meta data could be quite complex

Answer 1

We do not checkin files like .project, .classpath and .settings in our VCS for the reasons given by @seanizer: avoiding hell.

So here is how we handle things:

• we use m2eclipse or the maven eclipse plugin to derive what can be derived from the POM
• we use a dedicated build-tools Maven module to hold files such as our
  • checkstyle.xml as suggested by the Checkstyle Multimodule configuration
  • codestyle-eclipse.xml (Eclipse Formatter profile ready to import)
  • codetemplates-eclipse.xml (Eclipse Codes Templates ready to import)
• we document how to setup the development environment using the above files in our Wiki

All this is highly inspired by what Vincent Massol is doing at XWiki (see their Java Code Style page and their svn for a concrete example).