distributing eclipse build, debug, and external tool configurations to my coworkers - eclipse

I'm building some fancy build debug and external tool configs for an eclipse project so the build button will build locally, the debug button will debug remotely, and the external tool button** will deploy to a test box.
I find these really useful and would like a way to package them up and distribute them to coworkers. I dont want to push the whole project configuration on people because everyone has different project configurations.
ps: any background on how tasks are stored and how to import them would also be well appreciated.

You can mark a configuration as shared and it put it into your project as a file. You can then add that file to source control and it will appear in other developers' environments. On the Common tab, you switch from Local file to Shared file. I think this only works if you've got the .project and other configuration files under source control.
I just noticed that you're using maven, so you probably don't have the .project under source control. You may have to get each developer to manually add the launch file into their project. I don't know.

Related

Does the buildpath needs to reconfigured on local machine for a project checked-out through SVN?

This is my first time using SVN or for that matter any version control. So, I've been able to check out a selenium project on my local machine. This source code was working fine on the other machine(my friend's), but on my machine it throws hundreds of errors such as "BeforeClass cannot be resolved to a type, Assert cannot be resolved to a type" etc.
I do know that this error could be because the required selenium jars may not have been setup in the build path. But, I can see all these selenium jars in the "lib" folder.
So, I want to understand if I need to reconfigure the build path. By the way, don't the project settings etc come by default as the same code works perfectly on other machine, which means the build path must have been configured there.
I know its a very basic question, but I assure you that I'm a naive coder.
Thanks for your help.
Note: I'm using Eclipse IDE
Eclipse's project configuration files (eg, .project, .classpath, .settings, etc) are designed to be checked in with the rest of the project. If done so, whenever the project is checked out to a workspace Eclipse will automatically use them to properly configure the project. Check that your friend checked in those files; if not, ask him to.
It looks like you did not add Eclipse project metadata files(.project,.classpath) & .settings folder to your source control system, so Eclipse doesn't know what your build path is or whether it is even a java project.
Go back to your other computer and look for the following files in your original project root...
.project
.classpath
.settings/*
Make sure all are present in Source Control System.

Eclipse (Kepler): Qt project as subdirectory in eclipse project

We have an existing C++ project that is developed with eclipse. There is also a gui that is developed separately in Qt Creator.
We want to setup the eclipse project so that the gui is a sub-directory in the main project. The idea is that most of the gui development is done in Creator, but the entire project (including gui) can be built from eclipse.
I'm having trouble setting this up as a makefile build. I think I need to use eclipse' external tools to run qmake before building the project. The problem is that this creates the Qt makefile in the 'gui' directory and then eclipse doesn't see it.
This is how we ended up configuring this.
We have two build configurations, one for the main part of the project and one for the gui. For the main project, we exclude the gui from the build, and for the gui we exclude everything else but the gui from the build. The gui is build using a custom makefile that has targets for calling qmake and make. From QtCreator we just call "build" which runs the makefile, so qmake is never called from QtCreator.
It's not ideal but it works. The main drawback is that you have to switch build configurations in eclipse depending what you want to build. If I was setting it up again I'd make two different projects instead of two different build configurations in the same project. This way it's easier to manage the dependencies between the main program and the gui.
Indeed, you need to use the external tools. Add these in there: "qmake -project" and "qmake". The former is obviously not necessary if you have project file(s) already in there. You can then set the working directory, and arguments like the project file.
Then you can just run the externals tools from the menu. I am not sure what you mean by "Qt makefile" and by "Eclipse not seeing it."

When commiting projects should I include .project & .classpath?

When I commit a web appliction to source control should I also include the .project & .classpath files ? I don't think it should make any difference either way as other users who use the project should have the same project settings ?
This is the sort of question that gets people bent out of shape in a debate that never ends. You basically have two camps:
Only put source code into the source control system. Each developer chooses their own IDE and manages their own project configuration. Setting up your IDE after getting source code from the repository will be tricky. If one dev changes project dependencies, they have to explicitly communicate that so that all other devs update their project configurations. There are some tools that try to address this problem, like a Maven plugin that will attempt to generate Eclipse project metadata from pom.xml, but all have their limitations. Groups that go this way favor the purity of not restricting developer choice in IDE over the convenience of having Eclipse projects across the team that just work.
Standardize on Eclipse. Put all Eclipse project metadata into source control. This includes .project, .classpath and the entire contents of .settings. Basically, the only thing that you don't want in your source control repository is content marked as derived in Eclipse. You can check that in right-click->properties. Taking this approach ensures that developers can get started coding immediately after getting the project from source control. No additional configuration required. Also, when one dev changes project configuration, the rest of the team will see the same change on next sync.
Choose the approach that makes the most sense for your team.
For ClearCase, including the .project and .classpath can make a difference when you are using the IBM ClearCase plugin for Eclipse.
That plugin will work better if it can rely on those (versioned) files being there, right next to the sources (as opposed as being in the Eclipse workspace, which doesn't necessarily contains said sources).
In general, nothing generated should go into repository. Those files are generally generated by IDE or maven. However, sometimes you may need to click a button or execute a command to get those generated.
i would include them.
The .project file have plugin info (e.g. maven, ant, pdt, wst, aspectj, findbug..). It is essential if it is not a plain java project.
.classpath contain the classpath. it is needed if you use jar files.
I would say that all files - including .project and .classpath - should go to source control, to ensure that everyone in the team has the exact same setup.

How to share a common customBuildCallbacks script between multiple Eclipse plug-ins

I am trying to avoid duplicating customBuildCallbacks.xml for all my plug-ins, when called from either PDE's headless build or the Eclipse GUI. I have in customBuildCallbacks.xml steps to generate code or modify the plug-in packaging that I:
obviously want to run with the headless build
would also like to run either when I export this plug-in from the GUI or from an external builder watching specific files in my plug-in
The headless build runs in a well defined environment, so I can set customBuildCallbacks.buildpath or even use a relative path in each plug-in's build.properties to point at my common customBuildCallbacks.xml. However, this is trickier from the GUI: that path is different for every developers since we do not have sources in the Eclipse workspace (we import projects from various locations due to our internal build process). I was hoping for every project to have an associated ant property holding its path on disk, similar to the ${workspace} variables exposed in various dialogs. I couldn't find anything useful though.
Does anyone have any experience doing this kind of things?
Thanks,
Romain

How can I setup ANT with Subversion and ColdFusion Builder (eclipse) to check out a local build to work on?

I am not sure if there's an answer for this already -- couldn't find one for this (hopefully common) setup:
I recently converted one of my ColdFusion projects to deploy via ANT.
I have a local ant script that instructs a remote server to check out the code, and run the application's specific build file, remotely on the server.
I have a few endpoints:
Live - production (on the production server)
Staging - on the production server, different datasource, etc.
dev - on the local box.
What I have run into it seems is a simple and common problem. I now need ANT to create any build, even locally. Fine, created a local endpoint and it configures for my box.
Issue? How do I get it to show up as a project (automatically if possible) in Eclipse/ColdFusion builder. What I envision is instead of checking out a branch via the subversion plugin in CFBuilder/Eclipse, I now use ANT to do that for me.
Since I use ColdFusion Builder (Eclipse + Adobe's plugin), I have all of eclipse's tools and plugins available to solve the problem of : how can I best call ANT from within Eclipse/ColdFusion Builder, to setup the local build as a project that I can develop and work on?
I think when I check the code back in from the local box, I'd have to be sure not to check in any files with local config paths, etc.
I hope this is a detailed and clear enough explanation, if not, please ask.
Thanks in advance!
You won't be able to have it "automatically" show up in CFBuilder, but you can make it pretty easy.
Eclipse requires the ".project" file, which is a simple xml file that by default generally just contains the project name.
Once you check out your project from SVN, Do file -- new -- ColdFusion project and point it to the directory where you've checked out your code. This will create the .project in there. From there, you can commit that file to SVN.
Subsequent developers who check out the project from SVN can then do File -- Import -- Existing Project into workspace, and point it to their checked out location. Since it'll have the .project file in there (from when you committed it), that project will show up when they search for projects in that import wizard.
Now, that's how you'd do it if you already used ANT to check out the code. However, if you wanted a potentially even easier way, then you can just install either the Subversive or Subclipse plugin into CFBuilder, and then do
file -- new -- checkout project from svn
point to your svn url
select the directory you want to check out
choose a location where you want the code to live
click through to completion