How to add 3rd party libraries into Eclipse RCP?

Question

I'm using Eclipse RCP to write a GUI which would use Spring framework related projects, such as:

• Spring WebSocket client
• Spring Web Client

So my question is how to add this dependencies elegantly ? (Spring does not support osgi for a long time, there are many other ways which are very complicated and tedious)

Answer 1

I've found a good Solution to solve this problem. It will use following skills: Maven , Eclipse Plugin

The steps are:

• first, write the pom.xml which contains the dependencies you want, for example: spring-websocket

   <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId> </dependency> 

• then, you need to download all websocket jars, you need to use maven command to help you to do that :), the jars are all in /target folder by default

  mvn dependency:copy-dependencies

  Note: maven will handle the dependency tree.

• next, in Eclipse create a "Plug-in from Existing JAR Archives" project and import these jars

  Note: Un-check the "Upzip the JAR archives into the project". (Or all jars will be decompressed into folder and files then stored in the project)

• finally, add this plugin project in your main RCP project as a dependency . And you can write/run your websocket client now!

Hope this is an elegant way to solve this problem.

Answer 2

There are different ways to convert maven artifacts to OSGi bundles:

1. Eclipse Bundle Recipes
2. p2-maven-plugin in combination with a Tycho and a Nexus repository you have a elegant tooling to add thirdparty dependencies to your Eclipse-RCP project.