James Ervin wrote:
Alex,
I would love to hear the reply myself. You have outlined the issues
with using Maven for PDE very well. I think the issue is how well do
you want to integrate with the PDE? I know you could easily throw the
Maven Classpath container into a plugin project and the JDT will respect
it, the issue is the PDE tooling. Are packages in the maven cp
container allowed to be exported? What about the runtime classpath
entries in the manifest.mf? How about when self-hosting, are those
classes also used? I mean outside of the build automation issues, you
really really don't want to be writing code without self hosting or PDE
tooling.
Most likely PDE integration will be different for manifest-first and
pom-first projects. For manifest-first, we really want PDE to do its
things and m2e classpath container will only cause problems. For
pom-first projects, we'll have to find a way to synchronize PDE with
pom.xml. I have some ideas how to do this, but no code yet.
I know I don't have any answers for your questions, only am expressing
interest in the issue. One thing I will say, building Eclipse plugins
from the UI is easy peasy, trying to get the batch or headless mode
build working is a bit of a nightmare. If Maven could simplify this,
this would be a killer app that would perhaps force alot of Eclipse
plugin developers into Maven.
James
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Alexandre Sauvé
<[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> 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)*
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)* 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)*
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
--
James E. Ervin, IV
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,
die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Blog: http://iacobus.blogspot.com
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