Igor,
That's great news! I will definitely try Tycho once I get an idea on the
'How'...
For me I am more interested in the 'manifest-first' as I have worked already
with Felix and find that generating the manifest is not exactly the Eclipse
way to go... So that being said it seems that you have most of everything in
place for me to try! I would like some more information on what is
missing/implemented in the artifact repository front. In your email you
mention generating a target platform from a p2 repo, that is terrific! But
how do you configure such a repo or have a p2 implementation fronting an
existing Maven repo. If this work is currently on going how do you guys
work with your artifact as of today? Is your target platform prebuilt and
you point your maven build toward your target platform? Will your example
cover this?
Looking forward to getting my hands dirty.
Alex
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Igor Fedorenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello, Alexandre and others.
>
> First of all, I have to apologize for keeping Tycho development plans and
> progress to myself. I would like to thank you for bringing this up and will
> try to both explain our grand vision and what we already have or will have
> implemented in the near future.
>
> The big picture. Ultimately, we want tycho to be one-stop solution for
> doing Eclipse and OSGi development with Maven 2 (actually, 3, more on this
> later). We believe there are two distinct development workflows, when
> developer explicitly creates and maintains OSGi manifest and other
> Eclipse/OSGi metadata (we call it "manifest-first") and when OSGi metadata
> is generated by the build based on information available from pom.xml
> ("pom-first", naturally). We plan to support both development workflows.
>
> In manifest-first mode, tycho will use Eclipse/OSGi metadata and OSGi rules
> to calculate project dependencies dynamically, at build time. It will
> support all attributes supported by Eclipse OSGi resolver (Require-Bundle,
> Import-Package, Eclipse-GenericRequire, etc). It will use proper classpath
> access rules during compilation. It will support all projects supported by
> PDE and will use PDE/JDT project metadata where applicable. One important
> design goal is to make sure there is no duplication of metadata between
> pom.xml files and Eclipse/OSGi config files. In fact, tycho will support
> "pom-less" projects, where all required build metadata is derived from
> Eclipse/OSGi config files.
>
> In pom-first mode current plan is to provide similar set of features as in
> felix/bnd plugin, although I do not know if we'll be able to share any of
> the code. Additionally, Tycho will support Eclipse-friendlier Require-Bundle
> and will provide better support for developing multiple related OSGi bundles
> (I have not checked recently, so felix/bnd may already support these).
>
> In both modes tycho will support remote repositories both as source and
> sink for artifacts. We plan to support maven repositories, p2 and update
> sites, although level of support will likely vary. There will also be
> integration between m2e, tycho and pde to make the three work nicely
> together.
>
> So these are the plans... Disclaimer: plans do change! ;-)
>
> Now to what tycho is already able to do. Our first goal was to enable m2e
> continues build, so we started with manifest-first mode and I believe
> covered most of manifest-first features described above. Tycho already uses
> Eclipse/OSGi metadata to resolve project dependencies by OSGi rules and
> injects these dependencies into maven project model dynamically, at build
> time. It supports bundle, fragment, feature and update site projects (shame
> on me, but no RCP application yet). It knows how to run junit test plugins
> using OSGi runtime. Two big features that are still missing, are support for
> pom-less projects and work with artifact repositories, although there is
> prototype of target platform materialization from p2 repository already.
> There is also some rudimentary implementation of pom-first mode, but its
> usability outside of m2e build context is probably limited. Many smaller
> features are still missing and I am certain there are quite a few bugs too,
> but I think overall tycho code is in reasonably good shape already.
>
> Few words about relationship between maven and tycho. Tycho is not morphing
> into maven, but it provides maven extensions and plugins that enable maven
> to work with Eclipse/OSGi projects. Some of tycho functionality, especially
> OSGi dependency injection, relies on maven features only available in maven
> 3.0 which was very recently renamed from 2.1. Since there is no maven 3.0
> release yet, current tycho distribution includes complete copy of maven
> 3.0-SNAPSHOT.
>
>
> As for contributing to the project... well, this would be really awesome .
> I think the best way to start is to try tycho and see what is missing to
> support your projects and development workflow. Then we can work together to
> implement missing features, fix bugs, etc. I have simple demo that shows how
> to use tycho to build set of simple projects and some user-level
> documentation. I will try to make this available later today. I will also
> provide tycho dev env setup steps, so you can start looking at the code if
> you want to. And tycho distribution is already available from [1] (looks for
> the latest .zip file)
>
> I hope it answers your questions, but feel free to ask more, especially if
> something is not clear or does not make sense.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Igor Fedorenko
>
>
> [1]
> http://repository.sonatype.org/service/local/repositories/eclipse-snapshots/content/org/codehaus/tycho/tycho-distribution/0.3.0-SNAPSHOT/
>
>
> Alexandre Sauvé wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> My company has been using Maven 1 for a couple of years now and we are
>> looking to make the transition over to the Maven 2 world (waiting for the
>> best opportunity)! The UI for most of our applications are RCP based. The
>> build process for the UI is using the PDE and is completely autonomous from
>> our middle tier build with Maven. We are hoping that with the transition to
>> Maven 2 there would be some new functionality to allow for RCP/OSGi
>> development. Unfortunately we have found that we may not have waited long
>> enough! There have been several options that we have looked at to obtain
>> bridge Maven and our Eclipse Development:
>>
>> * *Building Eclipse Plugins with Maven 2
>> (
>> http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-Eclipse-and-Maven2/index.html)*<http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-Eclipse-and-Maven2/index.html%29*>
>> In this articles the authors describe in detail how they
>> integrated Maven2 and Eclipse. One aspect of their approach that
>> I did like was how they made use of the manifest file to define
>> the dependencies for the project (similar to how Eclipse works);
>> however they need to use the 'Required-Bundle' tags rather than
>> the improved 'Import-Packages'. Though well documented this
>> approach wasn't favoured as it did not offer the Mojos re-built in
>> a repo (they just offer the code for the Mojos but they don't make
>> their Mojos available) and the article was written in 2006. The
>> company, Princeton software, was bought by IBM so it is hard to
>> get a hold of the developers for the project.
>> * *CodeHaus Maven PDE plugin
>>
>> (http://mojo.codehaus.org/pde-maven-plugin)*<http://mojo.codehaus.org/pde-maven-plugin%29*>
>> This Mojo triggers
>> the PDE build from Maven. Though this approach would be fairly
>> straight forward in that the regular PDE mechanism can be used for
>> building the RCP application there are several drawbacks we see
>> related to the build occuring in 2 seperate build technologies:
>> PDE doesn't offer any way to easily integrate Maven 2 report
>> tooling into its build process (checkstyle, code coverage, ect.)
>> PDE is another technology for our developers to learn (more Ant
>> based build cycle)
>> * *Felix Bundle Plugin for Maven
>>
>> (http://felix.apache.org/site/mavem-bundle-plugin-bnd.html)*<http://felix.apache.org/site/mavem-bundle-plugin-bnd.html%29*>This
>> Mojo is based on the BND tooling. In this approach all the
>> dependencies are specified in the POM and manifest is generated
>> during the package lifecycle in Maven. There are specific
>> commands to provide the 'Export-Package', 'Private-Package', etc.
>> However the BND tooling will analyze the byte code to determine
>> some information such as the 'Import-Packages'. Though this
>> tooling works well for generating OSGi bundles it does not
>> leverage the tooling available in Eclipse. Once you have your
>> plugin working with its dependencies in Eclipse you then need to
>> rework your POM to ensure that the manifest that is generated is
>> equivalent to that which you now have in Eclipse. This is not
>> always a trivial process. Given that limitation this is the
>> process that is favoured at the moment. Some pros about this
>> methodology:
>> + What is nice about this approach is that everything is done in
>> Maven allowing you to now hook all the Maven reporting plugins.
>> + Leverage Maven 2 Repo for your dependent bundles (note that your
>> bundles cannot be of the format of a jar within the bundle - they
>> have to be more like regular jars to be used by Maven)
>> + Generate target platform in Maven
>>
>> However after reading the article 'Jason Van Zyl Discusses Sonatype, The
>> Eclipse Foundation and Maven' (
>> http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/van-zyl-eclipse-sonatype-maven) we
>> believe that Tycho seems to be the up and coming solution to bridging the
>> world of OSGi and Maven. So I have done some research into Tycho and have
>> some questions:
>>
>> * At the beginning of the Tycho development it was a set of plugins
>> to provide building with the PDE compiler (as it understands the
>> whole OSGi dependency/class loading issues), 'osgi-bundle'
>> lifecycle, generation of POM, etc. Now it seems to have morphed
>> into Maven 2.1? Is Tycho and M2Eclipse the basis of the
>> development for Maven 2.1?
>> * Will the new version be able to do everything with the manifest
>> that Maven 2.0 does with the POM? Through the manifest be able to
>> tell what dependencies are required? What if those dependencies
>> are only through Import-Packages (with a version to make life
>> easier)? Will the integration with the p2 enable M2Eclipse to
>> determine which bundles supply a given package and add the
>> required dependencie between the projects?
>> * Will the p2 integration be on top of the existing Maven repo or a
>> seperate repo to get bundles from?
>> * What is the timeline/gameplan for Tycho development at this point?
>>
>> So as you can see we are really just starting out down this path. We
>> would be willing to help with development if we find an area that we can
>> contribute effectively into the project. However as of right now we just
>> want a starting point to start getting our projects configured to using
>> Tycho. Could you point us in the right direction? The ReadMe file in the
>> release now is the one for the Apache Maven, so it doesn't really help with
>> the configuration of a project using Tycho. Is it the same configuration as
>> before? Should we be using a different version (previous version than
>> 0.3.0)?
>>
>> Thanks, Any help you can give would be appreciated!
>> Alex
>>
>>
>
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