Description Sven Köhler 2009-04-18 08:25:55 EDT

JDT contains a solution for a problem, that has now been open for decades:
incremental compilation

As far as I know, the Eclipse-compiler supports everything that's needed for this. Mainly, it seems to built and maintain a dependency cache.

Yet, as far as I can remember, there is no way of using this from a build.xml. Instead, people mess around with calling javac and doing a clean once in a while because constant in-lining has messed up the project.

This has to stop.

So I'm asking for an enhancement. Beside a rather simple Ant integration, like the one that there is now, a more complex abstraction is needed:
- the JDT-compiler must be able to run in Eclipse and Ant
- therefore an abstraction of the dependency cache is needed. One that uses Eclipse mechanisms, and one that runs inside without all the Eclipse-framework in the background


So the JDT-Compiler can be used for mainly two tasks:
- the full job:
compiling *.java to *.class and maintaining the dependency cache as well as deleting old *.class files that don't have a source file anymore
- half the job:
only deleting old *.class files and maintaining the dependency cache - but without generating *.class files. This is needed, so that people can still use the reference compiler javac that is provided by Sun to generate the *.class files.