Debugging with eclipse problematic

NOTE: The title of this issue and some suggested solutions below suggest that eclipse is the only IDE around

This is not the case and reaching the conclusion that using for example NetBeans solves these problems (because is has better maven integration than eclipse) is also regarded as a good solution to this issue.

Users of eclipse (or any other IDE for that matter) should be able to run all ECM projects as Java projects in
their workspace and see the results of any change immediately after pressing some 'restart' button. This is very
important because it enables us to leverage the full power of the debugger.

Problem 1:

The repository engine build needs an invocation of rmic and jpox, the maven build does that.

mvn eclipse:eclipse (correctly) creates a dependency of type 'project' from all application
projects to the repository engine project, but without rmic and jpox plugins eclipse fails to
build the repository engine project with the nessessary rmi stubs and jpox bytecode magic.

Eventually this leads to 'failed to connect' errors in the frontend when running it
in the jetty eclipse plugin. The current workaround is letting the dependency be of
type 'jar' which has as drawback that changes to the engine should be built outside
of eclipse (with maven) creaing all kinds of synchronization problems.

This can only be solved by employing eclipse plugins that let eclipse do exactly the
same as the maven build. Some investigation into rmi and jpox eclipse plugins
that can do this needs to be done.

Problem <2>

mvn eclipse:eclipse doesn't generate a .project file for POM projects (hippo-ecm, hippo-ecm-frontend etc), this means that POM
projects are not automatically imported, they have to be created by hand (file -> new project, etc)
However we do have at least one POM project with interesting content that we do want to edit in eclipse: the toplevel (hippo-ecm) project
itself contains all documentation (hippo-ecm/src/site)

Problem <3>

Maybe this is just a question of configuration, by I allways get a
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.jackrabbit.rmi.server.ServerRepository_Stub
when trying to run a repository application in the Jetty eclipse plugin.

This might be related to the previous problem, but I'm not sure since the missing class is
in the jackrabbit-jcr-rmi jar which is on the classpath.

Problem <4>

Atomikos lock files lying around that need to be deleted manually.