The Maven core developers have stopped maintaining the maven-eclipse-plugin, and shifted all their attention to M2Eclipse.

It is possible to get Eclipse to use the standard CXF settings, complete with checkstyle and PMD, if you are willing to install and configure enough things.

  1. Start with Eclipse Helios
  2. Edit your config.ini (on MacOSX, perhaps eclipse.ini) to configure at least 512m of PermGen space. We hope to reduce this requirement.
  3. Setup the Eclipse workspace by importing the predefined CXF preferences file.  In Eclipse, choose File > Import > General > Preferences.  In the dialog, select browse and choose to view all files (.).  Select etc/eclipse.prefs.  Click the Finish button to perform the import.
  4. Install M2Eclipse (at least 0.12) itself. Sonatype publishes instructions here.
  5. Install the Eclipse PMD and Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-ins from here and here , respectively.
  6. Install Benson Margulies' Checkstyle and PMD configurators from here.
  7. Use the 'import' option from the m2eclipse menu to import the desired CXF modules making sure to expand the Advanced menu and enter "m2eclipse" in the Profiles field.
    1. NOTE: The CXF build uses a custom rule implementation class.  The Eclipse PMD plug-in cannot locate this custom rule dynamically.  The m2eclipse profile disables this custom rule.  If you do not enable the m2eclipse profile, the import will fail with a warning about being unable to locate the rule class.