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[buckminster-dev] Re: Reusing existing plugins as commands/actions
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Thomas Spiessens wrote:
Hi guys,
one of our team members has written a new Buckminster command that
simulates the product export as you do within the Eclipse IDE itself by
calling PDE code. In this way, we don't rely on PDE anymore as we used
to (we used to export the product as described in "Eclipse Rich Client
Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java™ Applications" by
McAffer and Lemieux). Hence, our build script becomes a lot simpler.
Great! Your team gain more and more insights in Buckminster internals. Will any of you visit
the Eclipse Summit in Esslingen? We will all be there.
For us, this was a first attempt to create a Buckminster command. We
would like to have an action as well to do the same thing. Our goal is
to keep the number/complexity of Ant scripts (or any other scripts) to
an absolute minimum and to use Buckminster to take over the things these
scripts do.
The ComponentTypes for the PDE types (features, plugins, and fragments) are getting more
competent by the day. We now generate complete actions for plugin.export and feature.export.
We also have ant-tasks that does all the hard stuff when creating a product (branding,
copying files to root, doing chmod, etc.) and therefore it is very easy to create a
product.export as well.
Buckminster itself is of course created that way now, so if you want an example of how to
create a product.export action using a CSPEC extension, please have a look at the
buckminster.cspex file in the org.eclipse.buckminster.product component (you will need the
latest and greatest version of course).
What is your idea on reusing existing Eclipse plugins from within
Buckminster and providing commands/actions for them ? For example:
product export, javadoc export, ... All of them are available from
within Eclipse and I think it should be possible to reuse them.
I would love to. But most attempts that we have made so far has been fruitless since almost
all of the commands have dependencies to UI components. Not only will that make the headless
buckminster platform dependent, it also makes it much larger then we like it to be.
In one of the previous posts on this dev mailing list, Thomas wrote "We
intend to provide extension points so that actions can be tied to a menu
item of choice in the IDE, but the design of that is not finished yet."
Could you elaborate on this because this seems to be something we are
very much interested in as well ?
This is still on the planning stage so I can't give you much details yet I'm afraid. What I
have in mind is an extension point where you can map specific CSPEC actions to specific menu
items or wizards so that a popup-menu for a project will display such choices when the
associated CSPEC contains the named actions.
Our PDE component types for instance, generates a lot of actions such as the ones I
mentioned above. Other component type contributions that generate CSPECS could also benefit
from such an extension.
Kind Regards,
Thomas Hallgren
