The team that founded Apache’s Maven project has joined Eclipse to marry their popular framework and repository with the Eclipse platform and projects.

Engineers from Sonatype, the corporate backers of Maven, have also joined the Eclipse board, where they’ll play a part in the open-source group’s architectural direction. Sonatype has become a strategic member.

Jason van Zyl, Apache Maven founder and also founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, told The Reg he’d lobby for his Java build-and-release framework and repository to be integrated with the next version of Eclipse, due in just under a year. The idea is for Sonatype’s Maven plug in for Eclipse, M2Eclipse, to ship with Eclipse 3.5 - a first version of M2Eclipse is due by the end of September.