Development

The Maven preferences I use in Eclipse are the following. (Window -> Preferences -> Maven)

• Allowing Maven to download artifact sources and JavaDoc makes it possible to take a look at the source code of the artifacts you use and is also helpful for debugging.
• To make sure that the projects are up to date when starting to work in Eclipse I enable Maven to update maven projects on startup and to dowload repository index updates on startup.
• The option to hide folders of physically nested modules is very useful when using a hierarchical structure. The submodules of a parent module won't be visible under the parent module in Eclipse.
• As described in the post about the development environment setup the embedded Maven installation is disabled and the Maven installation of the development environment is used. As a result the global settings file of the development environment is used in which the local repository location is configured.
• The option to open the XML page in the POM editor by default is enabled because I prefer to edit the XML rather than to use the user interface of the Maven plugin.