Using Maven to build an Eclipse Plugin - latest opinions

Question

I am building a plugin for Eclipse - but as we use Maven as a standard build platform I would like to be able to build the plugin using Maven.

I have found a previous question about using Maven with Eclipse Plugins - but as it is a year old I thought it was worthwhile collecting some new answers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/545531/is-it-currently-possible-to-build-eclipse-plugins-by-maven-and-have-nice-ide-inte

It seems that Tycho has not been driven forward much in the last year - but has anything else been created that fulfils this need or is there an easier way?

Does anyone recommend still the Maven PDE plugin? Is this a cumbersome solution as it is just a wrapper for ANT scripts?

Answer 1

I'm on the Tycho mailing list and I see plenty of feedback that suggests that people are successfully building plug-ins using Maven. My current project isn't doing OSGi development, so I can't vouch from personal experience with the latest version of Tycho. It's also worth pointing out that Tycho currently supports (to the best of my knowledge) a manifest-first approach to building plug-ins (as apposed to POM-first) - this might be a factor in deciding if Maven/Tycho fits your project.

Answer 2

It seems that Tycho has not been driven forward much in the last year - but has anything else been created that fulfils this need or is there an easier way?

The project is definitely active (have a look at the git repository), regardless of the updates of its website and AFAIK Sonatype is using it (successfully) for m2eclipse.