Maven, Eclipse and OSGi working together
I just attended a tutorial on getting Maven to build plugins, features and Eclipse update sites. This is topical as we are in the process of moving our JRules build system over to Maven 2 — but have yet to tackle Rule Studio for Java which is based on Eclipse. The Maven 2 plugins Carlos showed are still on the bleeding-edge (not released yet!) but the approach looks promising. Reconciling the Maven 2 Project Object Model, that describes project dependencies, with Eclipse OSGi project bundles (which also describes project dependencies) would allow us to use a central Maven repository to distribute the sub-components (such as rule engine and language JARs) to the teams that require them — including the Rule Studio for Java team. It may also allow us to build an Eclipse Update Site for Rule Studio for Java with minimal manual work. As Carlos said however, these tools are not yet ready for production usage but are a work-in-progress.
That said, there may be other alternatives — the Eclipse Buckminster project as well as new Update Site (including Artifact Repository) support coming in Eclipse 3.4 and Eclipse 4.0…
March 17th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Although many people love Maven2, I’m in the minority. Maven2 tends to become a huge maintenance overhead. I’ve used before when I was working at IBM. My personal bias is that ANT is more than sufficient to get the job done without all the annoying things in maven. Probably the worse part of maven is the repository. Other repositories seem to work fine, but maven repository seems to suck. my bias 2 cents.
March 29th, 2008 at 6:26 am
I’ve come to appreciate Maven2, although it is a bit obtuse to the software developer. You get from it what you put in, as in, setup your own repository! And by the way, a cheer to the q4e guys for the dev code! — TTMDev