Working Eclipse features and plugins, I have a problem with building two separate features (lets call them One and Two) where Two contains plugins that depend on plugins in One. I use PDE Build and ideally would like to have the option to build just One or Two (assuming One was built at some previous point in time).
However, having built One and then trying to build Two I run into the problem that classes that were built in One cannot be resolved. I am trying to get the second build to use the .jar files which were the output of building One, but have had no success. It simply seems it ignores the build output from One.
I've tried various solutions, like using build.properties pluginPath property to refer to the .jar files I depend on. Copying the already built plugins into buildDirectory is not a good option either, since the environment I am working in is a bit messed up and the build directory also contains other plugins that are not to be built (including the plugins built with One).
Any suggestions are welcome!
Cheers,
Anders
In PDE, features are just sets of plugins. This is meaningful during installation but not during build. So you can't say "plugin X depends on feature Y", you can only say "plugin X depends on plugin Z"
So what you need to do is this:
Add dependencies to the plugins in Two which mention the plugins from One
Add One to the "target platform definition". This is basically a list of plugins which will be available when the plugins of Two will be installed at some time in the future.
This blog post should get you started how to create your own target platform.
[EDIT] These two blog posts might also be useful:
http://pweclipse.blogspot.com/2011/02/pde-build-as-workspace-export.html
http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipsePDEBuild/article.html
Related
I have an Eclipse-RCP project with multiple product_configuration.product files.
They are sort of siblings; product-B has all product-A's dependencies but have different launching/configuration.
The problem comes when I add a new plug-in to product-A (which I launch the most often), and then forgot to add the plug-in to product B,C,D etc.
It stays hidden until I actually launch/export the other configuration; only then I see it's missing and it's a bit painful.
Is there any way to solve this without manually adding plug-in dependencies into each product?
You could use a Feature based configuration rather than just plugins. Then you can have one or more common features used by all of the products and other features containing the plugins unique to each product.
Some more on features here
I have many small Scala applications and I would like a central place to manage versions of common dependencies.
I know I can set up a Build.scala file and define multiple projects. I used to have that, but not all of these applications are related in that sense. They just happen to share a common software architecture.
How do I achieve this with SBT? Currently I'm managing multiple .sbt files that I batch update (like dependencies.sbt, common.sbt etc.).
My initial approach was to start writing a plugin, but I got stumped along the way with getting dependencies working within the plugin.
I wanted to collect plugin settings and build settings. But I never got one plugin to depend on a set of other plugins.
Anyone tried this before, how do I manage central application profiles (both plugins and settings)?
Do you mean different applications? You can then just put your settings into global.sbt. You can look for more detailed description here
I have an Eclipse-based OSGi application consisting of bundles organised in features. I use a product definition to launch the application. In this definition, I can also set start-levels for my bundles.
Now imagine I want to add a feature to the running application. Is a p2.inf file the only way to specify start levels for the bundles in this feature? Re-defining and re-starting the product does not sound like an optimal solution as it's not really dynamic.
I am not aware of any real tooling support for setting start levels for bundles on the feature level. The only option you have is manual hacking with a p2.inf.
I think the reason that setting start levels is only really supported for products is that p2 can't handle the case where start levels are specified multiple times. This could easily happen if setting start levels on feature level was encouraged.
So, you can make this work on feature level, but only if you know what you do.
I have the same problem I believe: I have a feature that is both part of a packaged product and present on an update site to be installed into an Eclipse IDE. And I also want to set the start-level for some of the plug-ins to ensure a very early start-up.
I have overcome this with a p2.inf file with the following content:
instructions.configure=setStartLevel(startLevel:1);markStarted(started: true);
instructions.unconfigure=setStartLevel(startLevel:-1);markStarted(started: false);
(I don't think I need to specify the start-level in the product definition anymore though I have not tried to remove this yet.)
I originally used start-level 2, but at least for Juno packages, there are some plug-ins that are started at level 1 so I now use level 1 as well.
I think (see below) that I would like to structure a Clojure project as multiple modules, with ordered dependencies - just like Maven lets me do with multi-modules projects.
But I can't see how to do this with Leiningen - all I can see is the checkouts fix described in the FAQ which doesn't seem to be as powerful.
Will lein do this? Should I be using Gradle instead? Or is this kind of thing not needed?
Some more context: I am wondering how to architect a modular application that supports plugins (which I imagine means jars dumped on the classpath). And am wondering to what extent I can structure that as a core + plugins (I am thinking I should be able to do something with Clojure's dynamic code loading and not have to go with Java/OSGi). So I guess the driving motivation for a single project comes from wanting some way of packaging everything (the core + default plugins) as a single blob that is easy for the end user, but which can also be divided up (and which is built and tested in fragments, testing the logical independence of each module). More general advice about this is welcome
Update
A possible solution that wasn't mentioned below is using a Maven plugin - I assume that supports everything Maven does, but compiles Clojure, so will work with nested modules, etc.
First, it does not seem like Leiningen supports a module hierarchy like Maven does. The checkouts are the next closest thing it has. It should be sufficient though to develop a modular application in Clojure though.
For the project structure, I would have an API project, a "core" project, the plugins themselves, and a separate packaging project. The core and the plugins should only depend on the API. Which build tool you use to create the packaging project is up to you. Gradle would probably be more effective at handling the packaging, however having the "checkout" functionality Leiningen offers could make development of the system as a whole easier.
I would take a look at the code for Leiningen and Noir to figure out how to effectively handle this.
For dynamically loading the plugins, I would start with looking how Noir handles it in two of their files:
server.clj has namespace loading for all files under a particular namespace. Under the hood it uses tools.namespace, but you can easily see how it's used to require every namespace under a particular base. This is how Leiningen handles custom tasks as well - the base definition for the task should be in the leiningen.$task namespace.
core.clj has what I would use for plugin registration. In summary, use a map under an atom and add plugins to that map. I would advice wrapping the registration with a macro to keep your code cleaner.
What I listed above should be sufficient if you don't need to handle adding plugins at run time. If you don't have every plugin on the classpath during start-up, I would recommend utilizing pomegranite to add entries to the classpath. You can see an example in classpath.clj.
I have a set of plug-ins which need to support different Eclipse products. There is a core plug-in, which is product-independent, and an adaptation plug-in each for Product X, Product Y, etc.
Deployment-wise, I'm thinking one feature for the core plug-in and one for each product, containing the adaptation plug-in and having a dependency to the core feature, so the core plug-in gets installed without the user having to select it.
1) Is there a better way of structuring the features?
On the development side, I would like to be able to work with both the core and adaptation plug-ins within the same workspace, which as I understand it gives me two main options: a) working within each product using their respective installations as target platforms, or b) working in raw Eclipse with an explicitly defined target platform for each product.
2) What would be the best way to set up the development environment?
If option a), can I use the same workspace for different products or would I need to set up separate workspaces? In other words, are different Eclipse products able to share a workspace as long as they're all based on the same (say) major version, eg 3.x?
If option b), can Eclipse manage multiple simultaneous target platforms? In other words, can different plug-in projects within the same workspace be compiled against different target platforms during the same build? And if not, how could I automate switching between them so I wouldn't have to do that manually during a workspace build?
Or indeed, am I missing something fundamental and is there a much better way of doing all this?
The short answer is you can do it either way.
You can have 1 workspace per product, and each workspace has the target platform of that product. At the moment, eclipse supports one target platform active per workspace, not per project though.
Or you can have eclipse and the 3rd party plugins you need as your target platform, and simply work on all 3 products and the common plugin in one workspace. If your total source plugins is <20, this would probably be fine. For >20, eclipse supports Working Set which would hide the plugin you are not working on at the moment.