Eclipse plugin with Maven dependencies for third party libraries

Question

I am converting Subclipse to build with Eclipse Tycho and Maven.

Subclipse depends on a few third party JAR files that are not Eclipse plugins so do not exist in any p2 repository. Currently, I just include these in a lib folder within the plugin.

Since these JAR files do exist in Maven, I was hoping that by converting the plugins to build with Maven I could use Maven dependencies. IOW, the plugin would have a pom.xml where I used Maven dependencies to grab and include the third party jar's that have to be included in the plugin. Basically, it would just automate having to refresh what I include in the lib folder of the plugin.

Is this possible? I tried doing what I said above by when I build, I saw no sign that Maven/Tycho was trying to fetch the dependencies. I imagine it is because when the packaging is eclipse-plugin it looks solely at the Eclipse configuration files for the dependency information.

Thanks

Answer 1

To add plain (without OSGi metadata) jar files into your folder at biuild time, you can specify an <execution> of the maven-dependency-plugin to fetch them. However it will require to update your MANIFEST.MF Bundle-Classpath directive whenever a version changes.

It's usually better to hunt for OSGi-able jars or to make an extra effort to package existing libs as OSGi bundles/p2 artifacts like Eclipse Orbit or JBoss Tools Locus do.

Answer 2

Did you try doing the following after adding the dependencies to the pom.xml file?

• Project->Clean
• Right click on project: Maven->Update dependencies
• Right click on project: Maven->Update project configuration

Answer 3

Just adding the plugin to pom dependencies and including the entry <pomDependencies>consider</pomDependencies> in the configuration of target-platform-configuration makes it work.

<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.eclipse.tycho</groupId>
        <artifactId>target-platform-configuration</artifactId>
        <version>${tycho.version}</version>
        <configuration>
            <!-- The configuration to make tycho consider the maven dependencies -->
            <pomDependencies>consider</pomDependencies> 
            <!-- other configurations -->
        </configuartion>
    </plugin>
    <!-- other plugins-->
</plugins>
<dependencies>
    <!-- An example third-party bundle (plugin) present in maven repository-->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
        <artifactId>org.apache.felix.gogo.shell</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.0</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Reference link here.