Home » General (non-technical) » Eclipse Foundation » Reference Material on Libraries, Deployment, Jars
| Reference Material on Libraries, Deployment, Jars [message #35772] |
Wed, 14 June 2006 07:41  |
 Bill Winspur
Messages: 180
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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I have been using/learning eclipse for about a year, but some aspects of
the architecture remain obscure to me. In particular, the bundling /
resource-packaging documentation of the architecture is a bit too
black-box for my comfort, and I'd like to see some more definitive
structural documentation, supplementing the 'these are the operations
you use for these tasks' flavour of the ide help docs, excellent though
they are.
Specifically, if the following topics have documents, I have not
stumbled across them, and will gladly RTFMs if they exist.
1. What is(are) the 3.1+ generic structure(s) of a plugin jar, and how
are they deployed into the plugins directory.
2. What is the generic structure of libraries, (as shown on the
libraries tab of the Java Build Path page of the project properties
dialog) and how are they intended to be used? Are libraries an eclipse
or an OSGI artifact?
Not understanding and searching for info on the variety of structure in
deployable-jars, installed plugins and libraries has inconvenienced me
several times over the last year. I'd be a lot happier if I understodd
these resource-packaging entities I'm indirectly dealing with.
Any reference/architectural/design docs/articles you can steer me to
will be appreciated. My apologies if I've missed the info in front of my
face (articles corner, ide help, google, eclipse zone, etc), or if this
is the wrong group,
Bill.
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| Re: Reference Material on Libraries, Deployment, Jars [message #35840 is a reply to message #35772] |
Wed, 14 June 2006 17:17  |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: alex_blewitt.yahoo.com
Have you looked through the on-line help pages that discuss the plugins and their structure? Look in the PDE documentation, and look under the references part.
Plugin jars -- just export a plugin from the workspace, and you'll see what it looks like. It's basically just an ordinary Jar file, with classes and resources; though there's also a plugin.xml file (which defines which extension points that are contributed to by that plugin) and extra entries in the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file. They're deployed by either (a) being copied directly into the plugin directroy (and restarting Eclipse to pick up the change) or by the internal update manager (which largely does the same thing).
The libraries are just the Jars that your project depends on. You can think of those entries as being similar to what you'd tack on with a -classpath when compiling/running your code. As with any other Jar, they just contain classes. They're neither an Eclipse nor OSGi artifact -- but when writing plugins, you contribute dependencies by bundle references (performed by editing the MANIFEST.MF) instead of the Java libraries.
Just FYI, this is the wrong group and you'd be better off asking the platform newsgroup for the basics. You might also like to peruse the documents at either the OSGi website or the Equninox project, which is the Eclipse implementation of the OSGi platform (and the R4 reference spec, to boot).
Alex.
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| Re: Reference Material on Libraries, Deployment, Jars [message #35875 is a reply to message #35840] |
Wed, 14 June 2006 23:35 |
Bill Winspur
Messages: 180
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Alex Blewitt wrote:
> Have you looked through the on-line help pages that discuss the plugins and their structure? Look in the PDE documentation, and look under the references part.
>
> Plugin jars -- just export a plugin from the workspace, and you'll see what it looks like. It's basically just an ordinary Jar file, with classes and resources; though there's also a plugin.xml file (which defines which extension points that are contributed to by that plugin) and extra entries in the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file. They're deployed by either (a) being copied directly into the plugin directroy (and restarting Eclipse to pick up the change) or by the internal update manager (which largely does the same thing).
>
> The libraries are just the Jars that your project depends on. You can think of those entries as being similar to what you'd tack on with a -classpath when compiling/running your code. As with any other Jar, they just contain classes. They're neither an Eclipse nor OSGi artifact -- but when writing plugins, you contribute dependencies by bundle references (performed by editing the MANIFEST.MF) instead of the Java libraries.
>
> Just FYI, this is the wrong group and you'd be better off asking the platform newsgroup for the basics. You might also like to peruse the documents at either the OSGi website or the Equninox project, which is the Eclipse implementation of the OSGi platform (and the R4 reference spec, to boot).
>
> Alex.
Thanks for the reply, and the info sources. I think that'll help me.
Sorry about the inappropriate use of this this group, I finally figured
out that foundation is a political, not a technical term,
Bill.
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