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.
