Why are the Eclipse project files needed for a Maven project? Install the m2e plugin and Eclipse will generate the project from the POM.

The OSGi manifest should be generated as part of the Maven build (for example, using the maven-bundle-plugin) rather than being a static file in the source tree.

Maven can handle both approaches, i.e. a static OSGi manifest or a generated one. The Eclipse project files provided with this commit will not interfere with that. There are many projects at Eclipse.org that provides both Maven and Eclipse artifacts. This means that while you certainly may use m2e, it's not a requirement. The Eclipse IDE is fully capable of producing the bundle without it.

Changes for .project and .classpath look good. I like electrum's comment about generating the OSGi manifest file so that it doesn't need to be updated by hand. We can take a look at our build and deploy process on this side to see how we can fit that in. I'd prefer not to provide any JDT preferences if possible. Are there some specific compiler settings in there that were fixing some problems?

The problem with generating the OSGi is that you then also impose a requirement for a specific build system. Using the manifest as the pristine source for dependencies (somehting that Maven is capable of today), removes this requirement. The IDE is then sufficient to build the bundle. That means that other build tools that depend on the functionality provided by the IDE can build it too.

The JDT preferences were added to remove compiler warnings. The package contains a lot of unused imports and some raw types that should be parameterized.

Thanks for the contribution Thomas!