1. Open the Preference dialog and go to General/Editors/File Association.  Add a new file type with the *.launch suffix.  In the 'Associated Editors' box below, click on Add and assign the XML editor to the file type.
2. In the Preferences dialog go to General/Appearance/Content Types.  Click on the + next to Text.  Click on 'XML' in the tree so that it is highlighted.  Click 'Add' in the box below and add the *.launch suffix

Changing the color of the block that get's displayed in the right-hand side-bar when an occurance of a variable, field, or method is selected: Eclipse > Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations > Occurrences > Color

Alias package names in the Package Explorer: Window > Preferences > Java > Appearance > [] Abbreviate package names

I was having some funky issues with Eclipse and m2e not properly reading the pom.xml and setting up the .classpath properly when importing an existing Maven project into Eclipse from a cloned git repo.

When I did the following:

• Go to File/Import/Maven/Existing Maven Projects
• Chose the root dir of the the existing directory

I got the following error:

An internal error occurred during: "Updating Maven Project".
Unsupported IClasspathEntry kind=4

Initially, I solved it with a series of back-and-forth commands in both Eclipse and on the commandline to finally satisfy Eclipse that the dependencies were satisfied.

Thanks to the help of a friend I found a much easier process which enables me to cleanly clone, and import into Eclipse.

• Clone your git repo
• On the command-line in the same directory into which you cloned your source run:
  • $ mvn eclipse:eclipse; mvn eclipse:clean
• Open Eclipse
• Select File/Import/Maven/Existing Maven Projects
• Browse to the directory into which you cloned your source and select that directory
• Click 'Finish' in the dialog box

You should now have your project in Eclipse without any compile/dependency errors.

Eclipse (at least Juno) will complain that there is "No grammar constraints (DTD or XML Schema) referenced in the document.", even though there is no DTD for Ant build.xml files (see here for Ant faq about DTD for build.xml files).

To surpress the warning in Eclipse add

<!DOCTYPE project>

After the <?xml . . . XML declaration tag

When developing JavaEE applications in Eclipse it is more or less necessary to have all of the JavaEE libraries on the build path.

To do so, do the following:

• Unpack the version of the JavaEE application server that you are using.  In this case it is JBoss 6.0.0.Final.
• Run the 'Add a Server' wizard under the JavaEE perspective's Server tab.
• Add the Server Runtime to the build path/libraries:

• Right-click on your project and select 'Build Path/Configure Build Path'
• Click on the 'Libraries' tab
• Click on 'Add Library'
• Select 'Server Runtime'
• Select the JBoss Runtime declared server (from the step above)