Maven Tycho与Eclipse PDE Tools相比在导出RCP方面的​​优势

Question

In the light of some recent issues regarding JavaFX and exporting an Eclipse RCP application, I'm considering abandoning the Eclipse PDE exporter, and switching to a Tycho build.

1. Which approach is simpler, and which is over-complicated? Do I need to constantly tweak the Tycho build configuration?

2. Current project is already using ant scripts to build a core EAR. Should that be built with Maven to be consistent?

3. I'm aware of some issues between Maven and Eclipse Plug-ins. Is there anything critical I should be worried about?

I'm in heavy R&D mode.

Also, I don't consider this to be opinion-based, rather a topic asking for strong arguments in favour of each one of these two.

Answer 1

I wouldn't say one of them is much simpler then the other. Most often Tycho is preferred since Maven is de facto an industry standard for builds. As such Maven skills are more common. This also allows you to build an RCP product like any other application using Maven.

In Maven/Tycho both the pom.xml and the OSGi manifest include dependency information so there's a bit of redundancy. The idea is to have one of these files be the master version. If you choose OSGi files to be master then resulting approach is called manifest-first. Choose otherwise and you end up with POM-first.

I'm using manifest-first and my POM files for plugins look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
   <parent>
      <groupId>aerie-sdk</groupId>
      <artifactId>aerie-sdk</artifactId>
      <version>3.0.5-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <relativePath>../pom.xml</relativePath>
   </parent>
   <groupId>aerie-sdk</groupId>
   <artifactId>com.example.aerie.ui</artifactId>
   <version>2.5.5-SNAPSHOT</version>
   <packaging>eclipse-plugin</packaging>
</project>

I only need to bump versions in POM files to match the ones in manifest files.

Answers:

1. I'd say the one you're more familiar with is simpler. If you're new to Maven but have some experience with PDE build then Maven is harder. For Maven POM-first there's a need to tweak POM files quite often. If you choose manifest-first then POMs are not modified that frequently (and changes are simpler - mostly version changes).

2. You can run Ant from Maven, no need to convert.

3. Not really. If you hit any bumps there's a lot of information on Eclipse community forums, stackoverflow or similar sites.

Answer 2

I'm not sure your comparison makes sense at all. The Eclipse PDE exporter is an interactive tool, and as such cannot be used for an automated build. So if you need an automated build, you will have move to something else, eg Tycho.

Tycho is a Maven build extension which aims to make it easy to set up an automated build for projects developed with the Eclipse PDE. It re-uses the configuration files that you already have (MANIFEST.MF, feature.xml, *.product), so the additional configuration files needed for Tycho (pom.xml) are pretty minimal and rarely need to be updated.

The only piece of information which is redundant in the pom.xml file is the artifact version. To support you when updating artifact versions, there is a command-line tool: the tycho-versions-plugin .