Eclipse Community Forums: Equinox » How to export other (separate) projects with another plug-in project?

Help

Home

Home » Eclipse Projects » Equinox » How to export other (separate) projects with another plug-in project?

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator

How to export other (separate) projects with another plug-in project? [message #538268]

Mon, 07 June 2010 07:54

Arlindo

Messages: 33
Registered: August 2009

Member

I'm developing a plug-in, in a Eclipse Plug-in Project, that uses classes from a separate Eclipse Java Project (I added the Java Project to the Build Path of the Plug-in Project).

However, when I run the plug-in as an Eclipse Application and launch the plug-in in the new Eclipse instance, I get a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError for the classes of the separate Java Project...

How can I solve this? How can I make the classes in the separate project be exported with the plug-in?

Regards.

Report message to a moderator

Re: How to export other (separate) projects with another plug-in project? [message #538368 is a reply to message #538268]

Mon, 07 June 2010 13:35

Thomas Watson

Messages: 503
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

In general PDE expects projects to be self-contained. All other things they need to compile and run should be declared with OSGi meta-data to specify the constraints on external packages.

So the other project that contains the class you need should also be a Plug-in Project and should export the packages you need with the OSGi Export-Package manifest header. Then your original project should use Import-Package (or Require-Bundle) to pull in the other projects packages onto the class path. This should work for both building and running the bundle from your workspace.

HTH

Tom.

Report message to a moderator

Re: How to export other (separate) projects with another plug-in project? [message #538398 is a reply to message #538368]

Mon, 07 June 2010 14:36

Roland Tepp

Messages: 336
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi,

We've run into the same problem - we have a set of libraries that is
used on the server side (and built with ANT) and some of our plug-ins
need those libraries.

Invoking the full blasted PDE build on those libraries is undesireable
(the cost of setting up the PDE build alone is more trouble than it is
worth, maintaining it is even more of a headache)

For now we've settled on just copying those libraries into a "master
library" bundle/plug-in and building our RCP app this way, but it also
has its ugly long tail of problems and I would not recommend this to
anyone else.

If someone at Eclipse would suggest some better alternatives, I'd be
glad to investigate. For now we are considering including either Bnd
tool or Bundlor into our build/development toolchain.

Incubating b3 broject is also a promising candidate, but I'd wait for it
to mature a little...

7.06.2010 16:35, Thomas Watson kirjutas:
> In general PDE expects projects to be self-contained. All other things
> they need to compile and run should be declared with OSGi meta-data to
> specify the constraints on external packages.
>
> So the other project that contains the class you need should also be a
> Plug-in Project and should export the packages you need with the OSGi
> Export-Package manifest header. Then your original project should use
> Import-Package (or Require-Bundle) to pull in the other projects
> packages onto the class path. This should work for both building and
> running the bundle from your workspace.
>
> HTH
>
> Tom.

--
Roland Tepp

Report message to a moderator