Custom Eclipse Builder

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Contents

Introductions

The Custom Eclipse Builder is a lightweight Ant-based project to build a company/personal customized Eclipse distribution including company/personal relevant plugins, preferences and settings.

The modern software development process becomes more and more distributed characted. Now, a usual project is not a one-men work more, but a collective work of bunch of people communicating through network. Therefore, it's very important that each involved developer stands to the rules and guidelines applied for the project.

There are many tools that makes the development process easy. One of these tools that increases in popularity more and more is Eclipse. The number of companies, organizations or project teams using Eclipse grows permanently. Typically, in such a company a developer takes itself care of downloading and configuring Eclipse and all kinds of Plugins. Therefore, the more developers using Eclipse within of organization the more different versions, configurations and settings do exist. When a group of developers is working for a project and sharing the project's resources (and this is the typical case) using of different tools and versions may lead to any kinds of conflicts (unfortunately this is the typical case too).

The Custom Eclipse Builder is a very easy way to solve all these problems.

After you have installed and configured Builder you can build your own Eclipse distribution each time you wish (e.g. by scheduling a cron job) in just a few minutes. The Builder will download all desired Eclipse- and plugins distributions full automatically. There is no need to check a new plugin's version you wish to include in the distribution is realised. The Custom Eclipse Builder takes care of plugin's version management. Once installed and configured you can use Builder over a couple of months without any modifications.

How does Builder work

The architecture of Builder is very simple. The Builder uses an ant based script to build requested distributions. It performs following steps:

Installation

To install the Custom Eclipse Builder you have to perform following steps:

Configuration

Default Configuration

How to include a not supported Plugin into a distribution

If you want to include into the Eclipse distribution a plugin that yet not supported by the Custom Eclipse Builder you can define it in the config/private-plugins.properties. To define a new plugin you have to set Plugin Properties.

How to build your own Eclipse distribution(s)

After you have Custom Eclipse Builder installed and configured from a command prompt in the install dir type

Example ceb4java

The ceb4java example is intended to show how the Custom Eclipse Builder may be configured to build custom distributions. You will find the ceb4java configuration in the examples/ceb4java/config/private.properties property file.
The ceb4java example builds two customized distributions:

These distributions include following plugins: and include the custom Eclipse preferences examples/ceb4java/src/etc/ceb4java.epf and checkstyle configuration examples/ceb4java/src/etc/ceb4java-checkstyle.xml. Both files can be then found within of a custom distribution in the {eclipse-install-dir}/ceb directory. A Eclipse end-user has to import then the Eclipse preferences {eclipse-install-dir}/ceb/ceb4java.epf and the checkstyle configuration {eclipse-install-dir}/ceb/ceb4java-checkstyle.xml.

The ceb4java Eclipse distributions use a customized splash screen that appears while starting Eclipse. The splash image comes from the examples/ceb4java/src/etc/images directory.

To run the ceb4java example go to the examples/ceb4java directory and from a command prompt type ant e.g. build under Windows.

NOTE:The ceb4java example will DOWNLOAD 2 Eclipse distributions (win32 and linux-gtk) and 2 plugins (checkstyle and quantum).
DO NOT RUN IT IF YOU ARE NOT SURE YOU WANT IT!

For plugin's providers

If you are a plugin's provider and the Custom Eclipse Builder does not support your Plugin, you can submit your configuration to the Custom Eclipse Builder development team. Your Plugin will be included in the list of supported plugins.

Project

The project is hosted by Sourceforge and following services are available there:

Copyright © 2005-2006, Alexander Bretz