[babel-dev] Babel Language Pack Build Tool

[Kit Lo <kitlo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In December of last year, I mentioned
a language pack building tool developed by a group of 4 co-op students
at University of Ottawa (Team Azure), supervised by me and another very
experienced Eclipse developer from IBM, Tod Creasey. (See http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/babel-dev/msg00566.html)

We've gone through the review by the
PMC and the IP team (IPZilla – CQ 3082). We concluded that this project
qualifies as 
developed
under the supervision of the PMC.

Therefore, I'm very proud to introduce
this "Babel Language Pack Build Tool" as a new component to the
Babel project. I've just checked the code into the "org.eclipse.babel\plugins"
folder. The plugin names are "org.eclipse.babel.build.ant", "org.eclipse.babel.build.core",
"org.eclipse.babel.build.ui".

Before we have more documentation available,
I just want to present a quick overview of the tool here, so Babel users
may start to evaluate and help improve the tool.

The "Babel Language Pack Build
Tool" is a tool for Eclipse developers to build language packs for
their plugins. The build tool offers three user interfaces:
- Graphical User Interface
- Command Line Interface
- Ant Interface

You may launch the GUI Export Wizard
from the File>Export pulldown menu. Here are a few screen captures of
the Graphical User Interface.

The Command Line Interface has the following
syntax:
java -jar cli.jar --eclipse-archive
<eclipse-zip-file> --translation-archive <translation-archive-dir>

The parameters for the Ant Interface
is similiar to the Command Line Interface. Here is a sample build file:
<project name="test" default="main">
  <taskdef name="nlsbuild" classname="org.eclipse.babel.build.ant.BuildTask"
/>

  <target name="main">
    <nlsbuild
      eclipse="/work/eclipse-SDK-3.4-win32.zip"
      translations="/work/nls/Eclipse_3.4/piiDocTransDir/gr1"
      locales="fr,ar"
      workingDirectory="/work/nls/w">

      <coverageReport>
        <ignore pattern="^META-INF.*"
/>
        <ignore pattern="^org.eclipse.team.ui/reference/.*"
/>
      </coverageReport>

      <excludes>
        <exclude fileType=".*.java" />
        <exclude fileType=".*.class" />
      </excludes>
    </nlsbuild>
  </target>
</project>

Please try the tool out, comment and
help improve the tool! Thanks!

Kit Lo
IBM Eclipse SDK Globalization Technical Lead
Eclipse Babel Project Co-lead