With the Eclipse 3.3M5 build coming
very soon, I wanted to let everyone know about the changes that have been
made to the eclipse launcher and startup. Please see the wiki page
(http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Equinox_Launcher) for details.
For those who don't want to go that
far, here are the major points:
There is no more startup.jar.
Startup.jar is now a bundle org.eclipse.equinox.launcher. The
most immediate advantage to this is that startup.jar can now be updated
from an update site. Eclipse can still be started from java, only
now the command is something like "java -jar plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.0.v20070207.jar".
For those of you who have scripts that refer to startup.jar, it is
possible to copy the launcher bundle into the root and name it startup.jar.
We are now using the JNI
Invocation API. As much as possible, we will now attempt to dynamically
load the jvm shared library and start the vm in the eclipse process using
the JNI Invocation API. The launcher will still fork java in a new
process if the -vm argument points to a java.exe, or if we are unable to
locate the jvm shared library.
SWT in the splash Screen.
We can now use SWT widgets in the splash screen. The progress bar,
build-id and the "Loading ..." text in the M5 splash screen are
all done using SWT.
See also the related wiki pages: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Equinox_Launcher_Plan
and http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Splash_Screen_Improvements.