So it turns out I am neither crazy nor as inept as I thought and what I’ve been trying to do can’t be done.  I’ve been trying to combine Eclipse Indigo (3.7) + m2Eclipse + the Google Eclipse Plugin and a few other things to make the best development environment possible.  But there’s currently an issue with GWT 2.4.0 and the Google Eclipse Plugin + m2Eclipse.

• Google says it supports this integration and even has a tutorial on how to do it: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/tutorial/roo-sts.html
• The tutorial doesn’t work, google posted a fix that also does not work: http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/RequestFactoryInterfaceValidation
• There are lots of proposed fixes and workarounds, but none seem to work: http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?116544-Can-t-compile-with-GWT-2-4
• There are probably 6 completely different ‘fixes’ in that thread that don’t fix anything
• This is another thread on the topic: https://jira.springsource.org/browse/ROO-2799
• The final entry is a debugging work-around which allows maven to build / run the gwt app and debug in remotely in Eclipse
• NOTE: It appears that once you successfully build with maven, m2Eclipse is smart enough to not rebuild the project if no changes have been made and thus allows you to run / debug directly from Eclipse.  So I think I’ve got it:
• I have auto code generation, entity management, and database management from Spring Roo
• I have building and dependency management from Maven
• The maven build runs anywhere including Hudson (not tested, but a fair assumption)
• The Eclipse IDE works (save the build then run from Eclipse, must build from maven)