After building Callisto the Eclipse Foundation continues enjoying the space. This time the guys launched the Eclipse Space Shuttle to build an Orbit around the Eclipse Ecosystem. π The Eclipse Orbit is the eagerly discussed repository for shared components to be reused by the different Eclipse projects and – of course – within the Eclipse Ecosystem.
Although I like this idea I still would see more of this happen at the root source, i.e. in the repository of the originating component. Basically it’s just about adding a MANIFEST.MF file with some cool entries to the project and republishing it as a jar conforming to a specific naming schema. I would wish more Open Source projects would provide this out of the box. Even if you don’t use OSGi or Equinox it’s still a great way to document your dependencies.
Nice!!!
I guess Maven2 is the way to go. Still too few people on the mainstream using it..
For me it’s all a question of tooling. Managing project dependencies between Java projects is so easy using Eclipse, the bundle manifest and the PDE Editor. It’s much more convenient than editing any XML file manually. In combination with the build.properties and PDE Build you have a powerful build system.
Although I never used it, I like the idea of Maven where you have a central repository to download all the bundles from. However, Eclipse is my leading development system and all Maven integrations I’ve seen so far suffer from the intrusiveness to make Maven’s pom.xml the leading system. Ok it’s just a personal preference but basically that’s the reason why I still prefer Ant. π