title: Maven not worth it (yet) for EAR deployment?
body: <p>I'm in the process of porting several J2EE projects from Ant to Maven2. All of these projects contain 1 EJB and 1 web module, and use the recommended "skinny" EAR packaging method. This means that the JARs that the EJB and/or web modules depend on are all just put in the root of the EAR. Both EJB and web modules have Class-Path entries in their respective manifests to reference the specific JARs, plus the web module Class-Path will also reference the EJB jar.</p>
  
  <p>I was horrified (is that too strong? :)) to find that Maven doesn't support this very well. I read the official page on handling skinny WARs, but that meant I had to duplicate the WAR dependencies in the EAR pom and, even worse, also the transitive dependencies. It seems pointless to adopt Maven if you have to manually handle dependencies anywhere!</p>
  
  <p>I then starting Googling and found a variety of workarounds - obviously, I'm not the first person to (a) want to do a skinny EAR and (b) don't like the Maven suggested approach (which is itself a workaround).</p>
  
  <p>I tried some of these approaches, but none of them worked for me. I also found some issues that looked like Maven bugs, e.g. the WAR plugin 'packagingExcludes' directive excludes only the direct dependencies, not any transitive ones! Not very confidence inspiring. I found a JIRA issue for this specific one, but it's still open.</p>
  
  <p>I then found that my command-line Maven 2.2.1 does things differently to my m2eclipse embedded Maven (Embedder v. 3.0). Our developers would definitely want to drive Maven from Eclipse, so relying on the latest command-line version was not an option. </p>
  
  <p>So, my question is: right now, and for the forseeable future, is it worth migrating to Maven if we do all our development in Eclipse, and work mostly on skinny EAR projects? Is there anything in Maven's future that would make it handle EARs in a more robust and integrated way?</p>