And here is an developer works article on building eclipse plugins with
Maven....
https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/education/os-mavenecl/index.html
At the end they note the issue of non-jar dependencies.
Sachin Patel wrote:
Actually the many of the ant scripts are automatically created for you
and shouldn't require any tweaking...
Here is a good eclipse article on the recommended way to set up a
build enviornment using the PDE builder.
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-PDE-Automation/automation.html
By using maven, we're just respecifying all the info thats contained
in the plugin.xml for a given plugin, plus all the other goals to be
able to package the plugin as a deployable feature. So esentially
more work will go into building with Maven, then using PDE. So my big
concern is that we're wanting to use maven, just because everything
else is using maven. If we're respecifying all these things, like
dependences, new goals, etc.... plus you still have to manually
download Eclipse, WTP, EMF and point to an Eclipse install to build,
what is the advantage of using Maven? One of the big advantages is
how maven can automatically pull down dependencies, and this feature
cannot be exploited.
Dain Sundstrom wrote:
Wow! I can't believe Eclipse got this so wrong. Requiring a
generated ant script to build is a red flag to me. Anyway, I'm
going to try to get the maven guys to comment.
-dain
On Aug 23, 2005, at 11:24 AM, Sachin Patel wrote:
So as far as building is concerned, you're right, I took a quick
glance at the mevenide plugin scripts and they are building purely
with Maven. I'm still trying to understand the Maven build process
but looking at these project.xml' files it doesn't look like their
dependent on the Eclipse PDE builder, and they have the ability to
not only compile, but to package and create both plugins and their
features, as well as the jars for an update site.
But....
One of my original concerns was that plugin dependencies from
Eclipse cannot be downloaded individually. Eclipse packages and
makes available for download only full bundles of plugins/features,
such as the Eclipse platform itself, WTP (comes in two parts), EMF,
etc... The mavenide plugin doesn't have a solution for this, as
they require you to point to a full Eclipse install that contains
all your required plugins.
maven -Declipse.home=<path_to_eclipse> mevenide-eclipse:build
The second issue that Mevenide doesn't have an issue with, but the
Geronimo plugins do is the type of dependencies that are needed. In
Eclipse 3.1 plugins can be packaged as jars. So as long as your
dependencies are on plugins that have been packaged as jars,
dependencies can easily be defined like below... and this is so the
case for Mevenide it looks like.
dependency>
<groupId>eclipse</groupId>
<artifactId>eclipse-jdt</artifactId>
<version>3.1.0</version>
<type>jar</type>
<url>http://eclipse.org/</url>
<jar>org.eclipse.jdt.ui_3.1.0.jar</jar>
</dependency>
The problem is that not all of the Eclipse projects have fully
converted their plugins to jars and they remain exploded
directories containing "N" number of runtime jars. This is
problematic since plugins have dependencies on other plugins, not
their individual jars. So for those plugins that we depend on that
are not jars, we have then have to be fully aware of their runtime
jars and the paths and names of those jars, and have them hard
coded in the dependency list. Where all you have to define in your
plugin.xml file for the PDE builder is the plugin, not which jars
it contains.
So it looks like they've created quite of bit of infrastructure
that has been created for including some jelly files as well. Alot
of this may be reusable, but we definateley would need some kind of
way for taking care of dependencies that are exploded plugins. I'm
gonna dig in some more and see what I can get started, but I may
need some help on getting this going. I can provide you with
answers to Eclipse questions and you guys can help with my Maven
questions and togather hopefully we can get this thing building
from the command line.
QUESTION: So this will take some amount of work, do you all feel
that building purely with Maven is the best approach or should we
just take advantage of the eclipse PDE builder since Eclipse has to
be downloaded regardless and launch the headless PDE builder within
Maven????
Dain Sundstrom wrote:
I created an eclipse-plugin component is jira.
-dain
On Aug 23, 2005, at 6:59 AM, Sachin Patel wrote:
As far as what users want, let me make a generic statement. The
server tooling area is already an established area, especially
in commercial tools such as WebSphere Application Toolkit and
Rational Application Developer. Now IBM, BEA, and many other
participants are actively involved in the WTP effort in which
the goal is to provide tooling support for J2EE and other
application servers that not only provides a strong set of J2EE
functionality but is also a completely extendable framework. We
need to avoid two parallel efforts here in our tooling support
for Geronimo but rather build and leverage these frameworks and
projects that have been accepted and established already in the
open source community, and use this as our starting blueprint.
If and when this is an Apache subproject, its critical that the
Eclipse and Apache communities communicate and work together.
So my opinion is that we don't need to be re-inventing the wheel
here, but keep our roadmap and requirements focused on providing
the Geronimo specific pieces that integrate nicely with WTP. So
what the community wants for J2EE and server tooling is
constantly being discussed in the Eclipse community, we just
need to start getting involved in those discussions and bring
forth feature requests to them.
Sachin.
