We use Eclipse together with Maven 2. You need to install the m2eclipse plugin in eclipse for this to work. This plugin is available from http://m2eclipse.codehaus.org/.
It tends to work reasonably. It allows you to search for dependencies and compile from inside eclipse.
You need to enable Maven2 via the popup menu for each of the projects for which you want to use the m2eclipse plugin.
Each of the FreeHEP projects can just be imported into eclipse and should work with maven 2.