The final part of the puzzle is how to build plug-ins automatically. Most plug-ins are now built with Tycho, a Maven plugin infrastructure for building Eclipse plug-ins.
In this chapter, we will do the following:
Maven is an automated build tool that builds using a declarative file called pom.xml
that tells it how and what to build. Maven projects have a group, an artifact, and a version, all of which help in identifying them in repositories such as the Central repository, and also a packaging type that tells Maven what it is trying to build. The default is jar
since the widest use of Maven is for building Java archives; for Tycho, we need to use a variety of other types.
Maven Tycho is a set of plug-ins that allow the building of Eclipse plug-ins. Tycho requires at least Maven 3.0 to work; the instructions in this chapter have been tested against Maven 3.0.5 and Tycho 0.18.0.