You will need a properly configured Eclipse RCP development environment before you can make use of the PDE plugin.
You will need:
Install Eclipse as per normal (this guide will not cover this topic)
If you are building an RCP application then it is recommended best practice by the book Eclipse Rich Client Platform to create a target setup. This keeps the Eclipse IDE plugins separate from your RCP applications runtime plugins. Otherwise when you run your application the Eclipse menus like Project > Clean will appear.
Extract the RCP Runtime Binary into a directory (e.g. D:\ide\target\eclipse-rcp-3.2.1). This will be used as the location of "eclipseInstall".
Extract the RCP Delta pack into your target directory (e.g. D:\ide\target\eclipse-rcp-3.2.1)
Define the target platform in Eclipse, under the preferences Window > Preferences > Plug-in Development > Target Platform, browse to the location of your installed target (e.g. D:\ide\target\eclipse-rcp-3.2.1)
All PDE Projects that are to be built by pde-maven-plugin need to follow the directory layout convention as specified in Source Structure
If you wish to follow along with the Examples provided then follow the instructions below to setup your project area:
File > New Project... > General > Project (Next)
Project name = "PDE_Plugin_Tutorial" (Finish)
Create two folders for "features" and "plugins" in the project. Select the project "PDE_Plugin_Tutorial" and right click New > Folder.
Now that you have configured your environment you can start writing Eclipse PDE projects and get Maven to build them.
For further information see the examples provided.
The pde projects and their completed poms are available by downloading the tutorial archive from the maven repository, it has a "tutorials" classifer.
The same sets of files are available from the "tutorials" directory from the pde-maven-plugin source repository. Browse around in http://snapshots.repository.codehaus.org/org/codehaus/mojo/pde-maven-plugin/ to find them.