Thursday 31 January 2008

Building Eclipse RCP applications using Maven

Still experiencing some problems following the Codehaus tutorial. Downloaded the examples and unpacked them without problems into the correct directory structure in my workspace, but then found that Eclipse doesn't recognise the three examples as Java projects even after running mvn eclipse:eclipse on them. Moreover, trying to build the plugin using mvn clean install site produces the sad error message:

...\target\eclipse\startup.jar not found.
Have you set up your -DeclipseInstall?

My first thought was that my initial assumption must have been false (that it would be unnecessary to download the RCP Runtime and Delta Pack as detailed in the Codehaus tutorial, because we had started with the Eclipse RCP Developer edition). So I downloaded and unzipped them to a nice little target/eclipse folder of their own, and adjusted the three example POMs accordingly. While this is undoubtedly a Good Thing, because it masssively reduces the size of the exported product, it didn't magically cause a startup.jar to appear.

Luckily, René Gröschke has posted a commentary on the Codehaus tutorial, identifying where it leads the student astray. Luckily I can read German. I'll try to post here what I find out.

1 comment:

Immo Hüneke said...

The problem with the missing startup.jar file is a known incompatibility, introduced with the switch from Eclipse 3.2 to 3.3. You need the latest snapshot release of the pde-maven-plugin to get over this: see http://snapshots.repository.codehaus.org/org/codehaus/mojo/pde-maven-plugin/1.0-alpha-2-SNAPSHOT/