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Re: [eclipse-dev] Equinox Launchers and Splash Screens in I20061219-1300

This new launcher stuff seems not to work. I can no longer start eclipse
:-(
Using custom scripts that use "java -jar startup.jar ..." obviously no
longer work since it has been moved BUT: my Windows shortcut to eclipse.exe
that used to work for years is now also broken because the JRE isn't found.
See bug 168645.

Dani


                                                                           
             Andrew Niefer                                                 
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             20.12.2006 00:54                                      Subject 
                                       [eclipse-dev] Equinox Launchers and 
                                       Splash Screens in I20061219-1300    
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Today's 3.3 I-Build I20061219-1300, contains the new Equinox launchers.
These new launcher use JNI to start the Java VM in the same process as the
launcher.  Using JNI also allows us to use SWT widgets in the splash
screen.
This was done as part of the plan item to improve the launching experience
(bug 154088).  See the wiki page for details:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Equinox_Launcher.

Because of the number of dependencies across multiple components, there is
actually a regression in the splash screen until all the pieces are in
place.  Currently only changes for the launchers, startup.jar,
org.eclipse.osgi and pde.ui are in.
So with this build you will not see a progress bar and there will not be
painting after the choose workspace dialog.

But if you had a splash bundle, you could do cool stuff in the splash
screen :)

If the launcher knows where the splash bitmap is it can show the splash map
before starting Java, in this case the splash screen can appear
significantly sooner than it used to.  To see this, add the location of the
splash bitmap in your eclipse.ini file by adding these 2 lines to the
beginning:
        -showsplash
        plugins/org.eclipse.platform_3.2.100.v20061215/splash.bmp

Some basic changes to note:
- startup.jar is gone, it is now a bundle in the plugins directory:
org.eclipse.equinox.launcher
- there are fragments for each platform: ie
org.eclise.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86.  These contain launcher shared
libraries that can be loaded in Java using JNI to show the splash screen.
- the org.eclipse.platform.launchers feature is now
org.eclipse.equinox.executable

As a side note, we do not yet have creating the VM through JNI working on
linux.x86_64, linux.ppc and aix.ppc.  (See bugs 168271, 168278, and
168281).  For these platforms, the old launchers are still used and in the
root is a startup.jar which is a copy of the org.eclipse.equinox.launcher
bundle.  Even though we are not using JNI to launch the VM on these
platform, we are using JNI to load the launcher library and enable the SWT
splash screen.

In getting this far, thanks go Sonia Dimitrov for all the work in switching
the builds to the new shape.  Also thanks to the SWT team, particularly
Silenio Quarti and Grant Gayed, as well as Wassim Melhem and Tom Watson.

-Andrew

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