Maven itself is a Mavenized multi-module project, Generally there are two ways to import a Mavenized project into a IDE like eclipse:
Pre-requirment:
- Suppose you have installed Maven 3 and setup environment variable
properly.
- if you use Eclipse, you also need add M2_REPO to you
Build Path -- Classpath Variable, check out here for how to
setup. this tells Eclipse where to find jar dependencies stored in
local maven repository.
Option 1 -- Import as Java Project:
Open a command prompt and go to the extracted source folder, run mvn eclipse:eclipse
and waiting for it finish, make sure it doesn't popup any message start with [ERROR], this
will download all required jar dependencies from internet to you
local maven repository and create .project and .classpath for Eclipse
to use when doing import.
In eclipse, go to File -- Import -- General -- Existing Project into
Workspace, select the extracted source folder as root directory. This
will import a group of projects into Eclipse as bunch of regular java
projects (i.e. project icon inside Package Explorer watermarked with a
capital J).
Option 2 -- Import as Maven Project:
- Alternatively, if yo got m2e plugin installed in Eclipse, you can
directly import the extracted project folder, go to File -- Import --
Maven -- Existing Maven Projects, select the extracted source folder
as Root Directory. This will import a group of projects into Eclipse
as bunch of Maven projects (project icon inside Package Explorer
watermarked with a Capital M).
Hope this helps.