Adrian,
nothing forces you to use maven to develop/deploy your JavaEE projects to AS7 in Eclipse. However Maven is the defacto build tool nowadays, so it's not a bad idea to try and play with it.
Jboss Tools 3.3.0.M5 (https://community.jboss.org/en/tools/blog/2011/12/23/jboss-tools-m5-is-coming-to-town) can help you kickstart fully maven ready JavaEE projects from the JBoss Central dashboard, projects you can then deploy on AS7 via the standard WTP tooling.
So, from the Milestones update site (http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/indigo/), in the Abridged JBoss Tools category, you should install at least :
* JBoss Central
* JBoss Central Community
* JBoss Maven Project Examples (and all Maven related features you might be interested in)
* JBossAS Tools
* Context and Dependency Injection Tools (optional but recommended for JavaEE6 development)
After installing these plugins and restarting your workspace, JBoss Central willl open automatically. From there, you can :
- create a simple JavaEE6 web application from the New Project section (JavaEE Web Project)
- create a multi module JavaEE6 EAR application from the New Project section (JavaEE Project)
- create project examples with cheatsheets (kinda eclipse interactive tutorials) from the Project Example Section.
HIH
Fred