Until now I used the Eclipse plugin to develop and test Google App Engine applications. Today I tried the Maven GAE Plugin, in order to become more flexible and independent from Eclipse. My first observations were:

• As I started with the Maven GAE Archetype, the package declaration of the generated code did not match the actual file location. That needed to get corrected first.
• I changed the compiler settings from 1.6 (default settings of the archetype) to 1.5 and had to remove some @Override annotations.
• The gae.home property is undefined (which makes sense), but I had to define it to run the development server.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the first run. Although Maven adds a lot of overhead, and the actual build process took a bit too long initially to download all dependencies, the overall impression is very good.