Maven: No marketplace entries found to handle castor, antrun, and ear plugins

This is a "feature" of the M2E plugin that had been introduced a while ago. It's not directly related to the JBoss EAR plugin but also happens with most other Maven plugins.

If you have a plugin execution defined in your pom (like the execution of maven-ear-plugin:generate-application-xml), you also need to add additional config information for M2E that tells M2E what to do when the build is run in Eclipse, e.g. should the plugin execution be ignored or executed by M2E, should it be also done for incremental builds, ... If that information is missing, M2E complains about it by showing this error message:

"Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration"

See here for a more detailed explanation and some sample config that needs to be added to the pom to make that error go away:

https://www.eclipse.org/m2e/documentation/m2e-execution-not-covered.html

This probably relates to a M2E connector not existing for the "run" goal of the maven-antrun-plugin. See http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/TOOLS/M2E+Connectors for more information.

Eclipse is only able to perform a subset of Maven build functions, and the M2E Eclipse plugin helps expand Eclipse's repertoire using its "Connectors", which are available for download in the Marketplace.