The BDT (Build Development Tools) Project is working towards providing a fully functional Build Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the Eclipse platform.
The idea is, that you can develop and maintain a build environment within Eclipse. We'll implement an abstract build model with the ability to generate environment specific build scripts. This could be Ant, Maven, Make or any other build scripting language.
Since build environments are getting more and more important, also the need to maintain them is increasing a lot.
Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.
Ant, Maven and Make are build tools to control the generation of executables and other non-source files.