Is it currently possible to build Eclipse Plugins by Maven AND have nice IDE Integration?

Question

I'm currently evaluating maven to improve our build process. The building and creating of normal jar files works so far, although I'm not entirely happy with the Maven IDE.

I'm now at that point, where all libs I need for our project are built, and I'm moving on to the Eclipse RCP projects. And now I'm not sure how to go on.

There are some plugins I need to build first, before moving on to the actual RCP part. Therefore I have actually 3 problems.

I want to build those plugins, the only real solution for that seems to be the maven-bundle-plugin: http://felix.apache.org/site/apache-felix-maven-bundle-plugin-bnd.html

But, For nice IDE integration I also need the appropriate files (plugin.xml, build.properties, etc ...) which should be generated automatically.

For building the RCP parts, it seems so far the only solution is only the pde-maven-plugin http://mojo.codehaus.org/pde-maven-plugin/ which, as far as I can tell, uses ant-pde. This is stupid, isn't it?

The only other thing I could found was tycho (http://www.sonatype.com/people/2008/11/building-eclipse-plugins-with-maven-tycho/) , but this is till in a very early stage.

and again, a nice Eclipse integration is necessary. I really, really, really don't want to specify dependencies twice.

So How do you build your Eclipse RCP projects with maven?

Update

For now, it seems that there is no such solution available. Tycho looks very promising, but I wasted 2 days and didn't get it to run (the current version at this point). Maybe it will be ready in half a year or so.

Answer 1

No there is no such tool. Tycho is also the only approach I know of.

Answer 2

In our project we have separated the target platform and the application plugins. In short: we build the target platform with Maven, while the application plugins are built with PDE.

Answer 3

I used Mavenide for a while, it was just ok. Not sure on how it is today though.

Answer 4

I use m2eclipse and it fits well my needs. You specify your dependencies in the pom.xml and they are automatically taken into account in Eclipse's build path.

Caveat: I cannot tell anything about RCP (never built anything for that platform).

Best regards,

Cyril

Answer 5

Are you dead set on using maven to build your RCP apps? I ask this because, from my experience using maven to build anything more than trivial RCP apps can be quite a pain. When I started working on RCP applications I initially investigated using maven as a build solution, but found out that the support for eclipse builds within maven was very basic at the time. Also, some co-workers of mine are using maven for another RCP based project in our company, and while the support for eclipse has gotten better, they had to jump through some hoops to get it to work to their liking. So, my opinion is that for now, stick to using the ant based pde build for your RCP applications.