Many IDEs supports to import maven projects directly, but maven has a maven-eclipse-plugin, when you run :
mvn eclipse:eclipse
It will generate eclipse project settings ,then you can import as generic eclipse project.
Which one is better?
I prefer the first one, as my IDE is eclipse 3.5 shiped with WTP 3.1 and m2eclipse, I don't know if maven-eclipse-plugin support WTP 3.1 project settings ? If I don't import correct project settings,
I don't think eclipse will recognize my project,when I deploy a web application, it ususally can't find webroot folder.