Using Eclipse WTP with Maven's eclipse:eclipse Goal

If you use Maven's "eclipse:eclipse" goal to generate a project descriptor for eclipse, by default you're just going to get a plain Java project. You'll have to add in the Dynamic Web facet in order to tell Eclipse that you can deploy this project in a web container. The easy way around this is to configure the maven-eclipse-plugin in the pom.xml file like this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-eclipse-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.8</version>
  <configuration>
    <wtpContextName>some/url/context</wtpContextName>
    <wtpversion>1.5</wtpversion>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Also, I like to download sources and Javadoc, which makes navigating in Eclipse a lot easier. This can be done like this.

<plugin>
  ...
  <configuration>
    <downloadSources>true</downloadSources>
    <downloadJavadocs>true</downloadJavadocs>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Supposing you also want your project to have JPA facets, or other additional project facets you could also add them in like this

<plugin>
  ...
  <configuration>
    <additionalProjectFacets>
      <jpt.jpa>2.0</jpt.jpa>
    </additionalProjectFacets>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

And all of these can be combined to do this

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-eclipse-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.8</version>
  <configuration>
    <wtpContextName>list</wtpContextName>
    <wtpversion>1.5</wtpversion>
    <downloadSources>true</downloadSources>
    <downloadJavadocs>true</downloadJavadocs>
    <additionalProjectFacets>
      <jpt.jpa>2.0</jpt.jpa>
    </additionalProjectFacets>
  </configuration>
</plugin>