Tag Archives: Tutorials

Building a cross-platform, feature-based Eclipse RCP Product with Tycho II: Mind your OSs

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My blog has moved to a new home. Please go to http://blog.sdruskat.net for the Brand New Code on the Block! And – like they said in the nineties – “don’t forget to update your bookmarks”. Link to this post on the new site: http://wp.me/p3klLL-4T.

If you have followed Building a cross-platform, feature-based Eclipse RCP Product with Tycho (the umpteenth), and have run the build on a Windows system, you will have ended up with non-executable products for Mac OS X and Linux.

What this means is that the product will build just fine, but when transferring the product zips to the target system (Mac OS X, Linux), unzipping them, and trying to run them by double-clicking on the executable, nothing will happen. This is due to the fact that Windows does not know about file system permissions, as used for *nix systems (such as Mac OS X and Linux).

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Dynamically calculating the position constraints for a figure in a GEF editor layout in relation to another figure

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My blog has moved to a new home. Please go to http://blog.sdruskat.net for the Brand New Code on the Block! And – like they said in the nineties – “don’t forget to update your bookmarks”. Link to this post on the new site: http://wp.me/p3klLL-48.

I’ve worked on the implementation of a GEF editor for an EMF-based model, using both the GEF book and vainolo‘s great GEF tutorials. The model consists of several types of nodes and connections, with different layout requirements for the display of their figures in the editor, as follows.

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Building a cross-platform, feature-based Eclipse RCP Product with Tycho (the umpteenth)

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My blog has moved to a new home. Please go to http://blog.sdruskat.net for the Brand New Code on the Block! And – like they said in the nineties – “don’t forget to update your bookmarks”. Link to this post on the new site: http://wp.me/p3klLL-3z.
DISCLAIMER: This solution was tested with Eclipse Indigo (3.7.2), Java JDK 1.6.0_37, Tycho 0.16.0, using a Target Definition which contains p2 repositories only, and a Product Definition which is feature-based. A “delta pack” is not needed, as all necessary plug-ins can be pulled from Eclipse release-train p2 repositories.
Other setups may work, but have not been tested.
If you build on a Windows system, you will end up with non-executable products for Mac OS X and Linux. For more information, and how to fix this, please read Building a cross-platform, feature-based Eclipse RCP Product with Tycho II: Mind your OSs.

While the info in this post can easily be found elsewhere, I’m trying to give a beginner-friendly, hopefully at least half-coherent explanation of the topic. Part of the rationale behind this is to make a note to myself, so please forgive any inaccuracies (or better still, comment on them).

When I first set out to build an RCP application, I had to declare dependencies to mavenized OSGi-bundles, which very quickly led me to Tycho, a “set of Maven plugins and extensions for building Eclipse plugins and OSGi bundles with Maven”. And while I managed to get my basic build to work relatively quickly with Tycho 0.13.0 (after a few posts to the immensely helpful tycho-user mailing list, a few questions on stackoverflow.com, and a dozen bundles of pulled out hair), I ran into problems with realizing a working cross-platform build.

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EclipseCon Europe 2012 – lessons learned

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My blog has moved to a new home. Please go to http://blog.sdruskat.net for the Brand New Code on the Block! And – like they said in the nineties – “don’t forget to update your bookmarks”. Link to this post on the new site: http://wp.me/p3klLL-2e.

Last week I went to my first ever developer conference (apart from a local Eclipse Demo Camp for the Juno release): EclipseCon Europe 2012. It could be summed up in one word: GREAT!

In the course of the conference, I’ve learned a great deal about Eclipse, its projects, Java, OSGi (EclipseCon was co-locating with the OSGi Community Event 2012), and programming in general, but also about open source communities, more precisely the Eclipse community.

In this post I’d like to share some of the stuff I’ve learned as well as some more general thoughts about my experiences at EclipseCon.

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Getting started with the Eclipse RCP

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My blog has moved to a new home. Please go to http://blog.sdruskat.net for the Brand New Code on the Block! And – like they said in the nineties – “don’t forget to update your bookmarks”. Link to this post on the new site: http://wp.me/p3klLL-p.

Everybody has to start somewhere, and as a complete beginner in software development with Java and the Eclipse RCP, I have been, and still am, constantly on the lookout for sources of information.

The following books and websites – in my opinion – provide good starting points for people who are in the same position.

Ordered by usefulness (IMHO).

The Eclipse Book

Jeff McAffer, Jean-Michel Lemieux, Chris Aniszczyk: Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Second Edition. Boston (Addison-Wesley): May 2010. 552 pp. In English. ISBN-13: 978-0321603784.

For people who like to read books rather than websites. It is as up-to-date as can be, and is a very good and comprehensive introduction to the Eclipse RCP. Can be read back-to-back, or used as a reference. I have used this almost exclusively in my “early days” of programming with the Eclipse RCP.

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