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eclipsemaveneclipse-plugintycho

Developing eclipse plugin using maven dependencies

I've been beating my head against a wall for about 6 months now and have not found a concise way of understanding the mechanism for developing an eclipse plugin with third-party resources.

We are attempting to develop an Eclipse ODA to ride on top of in-house Spring-based code that accesses a REST based info set.

In broad strokes - this is what I feel that we need to be able to do:

  • Augment our maven artifacts with Eclipse bundle information using tycho or a the felix bundle plugin.
  • Set up a plugin project through Eclipse for the ODA Implementation & UI.
  • Have Tycho generate the poms etc for the plugin.

Now here's where I get muddy. I understand that there are two approaches

  1. Manifest-First - which is the standard mechanism for defining a plugin's dependencies
  2. POM-First - which provides dependencies via Maven's resolution mechanisms.

I'm not entirely sure where to begin trying to start doing this as I've never worked on developing an eclipse plugin.

One of the other questions I have is, how does a developer of an eclipse plugin (maven aside) leverage already existing third-party code (i.e. Apache HttpClient 4.x)? Do they have to download the jars, dump them into a directory within the project, add to classpath, then go from there or is there a "repository" mechanism similar to what is used with ivy, maven, gradle?

Thanks in advance and I apologize if I was rambling a bit with that.

Solution

  • The best way for an Eclipse plugin to consume libraries is as OSGi bundles. You just install those bundles into your target platform and reference them in the same way as eclipse.org plugins. Some of the library providers already offer their libraries as OSGi bundles. Absent that, you can typically turn a plain library jar into an OSGi bundle simply by adding a few manifest entries.

    Depending on the build system you use and whether the libraries you need are available as OSGi bundles packaged into an online p2 repository, you can reference the URL and rely on your build to download and install the bundle.