Automatically building Eclipse plug-ins has been sort of difficult for quite a while.
Running the build manually from PDE works, but it’s pretty much a black box and you can’t always get what you want from that. It can sign plug-ins when choosing Export… -> Deployable plug-ins…, but it can’t do this when building a whole update site. If you are used to Maven, Ant or another command line build tool, then things like this are truly annoying.
There are, of course, some tools provided by the Eclipse Foundation for headless building of plug-ins, but they don’t seem easy to set up or convenient to use. Tycho for Maven 3 aims to change that, making it possible to build OSGi bundles / Eclipse plug-ins in an environment familiar to most developers and with minimal additional configuration.
Background
Tycho still doesn’t have an 1.0 release, but seems pretty stable, if lacking a few features. It doesn’t yet have a lot of updated or detailed documentation, but I found help in blog posts about building with Tycho. Mattias Holmqvist’s posts, for example, are recommended reading.
The information I found was sometimes outdated, though, or didn’t go into the things that we needed to make a headless build for JRebel for Eclipse, which has had over 800 downloads in February alone and continues to climb the charts on the Eclipse Marketplace. I figured that since others may have similar needs to ours at ZeroTurnaround, it would be cool to share this experience with everyone (*note: this post assumes some experience with Maven and PDE).
First, I’ll describe what we needed from Tycho. JRebel for Eclipse consists of 6 Eclipse plug-ins, some of which depend on each other. One plug-in provides general JRebel/Eclipse integration, another embeds JRebel itself, and others provide debugger, WTP and RAD integration. We needed to be able to:
- use existing meta-data (manifest-first model), so that we can still use PDE for development
- build the whole set of plug-ins at once when doing a new JRebel release
- sign all our plug-ins and features
- build single plug-ins separately to release bug fixes quickly
It was actually quite easy to get the first three requirements met by a Tycho build, but it turned out the fourth one was harder to achieve (more on that later).
At first I just added a pom.xml file to each plug-in and feature, specifying the artifact name, version and packaging type for each. Tycho can even generate a basic pom.xml for you. A parent pom.xml was added to define some common Maven plug-in settings. I also created a new update site project, which only has the site.xml that says which versions of what features to add to the site.
Sample project: Achievements for Eclipse
To make things easier to demonstrate, let’s create a sample project that mimics the setup I used. And to make it more fun (or ridiculous, take your pick), the sample project will add a couple of achievements to Eclipse, similar to Steam, Xbox or Playstation achievements. I got the idea for that from this post. The project structure will be like this:
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ZeroTurnaround is proud to announce Frostbyte, a new stack-based language for the JVM. The language was born out of frustration of working with the standard Java software stack and tools. Hopefully this language will be the long awaited answer to the myriad of JVM languages that have hit the streets in the past couple of years. With some confidence, we believe that Frostbyte will solve both social and engineering problems that software developers have to deal with.