How can I execute Maven goals from Eclipse without M2Eclipse?

I am using the eclipse plugin for maven to generate eclipse projects from maven pom.xml files.

mvn -Dwtpversion=1.5 eclipse:eclipse

This works fine and, after some experimenting with several of the 400 different archetypes available, I settled on using the webapp-javaee6 archetype, which was the only one which generated a set of dependencies that were both all available and which created a project that was useable by the WTP plugin.

The problem now is that I would like to be able to invoke mvn goals from eclipse. The accepted way to do this I understand is to use the m2eclipse plugin, which I have installed.

However, after playing around a bit and getting nowhere I discovered this comment in my .project file:

<comment>NO_M2ECLIPSE_SUPPORT: Project files created with the maven-eclipse-plugin are not supported in M2Eclipse.</comment>

Further searching (see this lengthy diatribe from Oct开发者_开发技巧ober) suggests I'm not (just) being stupid in not being able to get this to work.

The how-to linked in the top answer to this question seems hopelessly out of date.

So, the real question - what is currently the correct way to use maven to generate a WTP-friendly project that can be converted to eclipse and then use eclipse to call the project's goals?

Have you tried File -> Import -> Check out existing Maven Projects from SCM? My understanding is that m2eclipse will then create the eclipse project for you. If the packaging defined in the pom is war, the project should be deployable with WTP. (The latter used to require an the maven-wtp-integration plugin as well, don't know whether that's still the case).

Not sure about WTP or maven archetypes, but have you come across SpringSource Tool Suite (Spring packaged eclipse) and created a Spring Roo project? You can use this to create a data driven maven built web-app in a few mins. You can even remove the spring roo bits if you don't want them, it will give you a good starting point for a web-app with very little pain.