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Re: [virgo-dev] Wrong bugzilla entry and other questions


On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Daniel Marthaler <DMarthaler@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Regarding the update to Java 8 I can't see any need for a change in Virgo Tools so far. But if needs arise I will contact you asap.

Thanks
 
I share your opinion for the Java 7 API level and that Virgo should provide a Java 7 profile. I'm currently at the point that Virgo compiles using Java 8 with source and target set to 1.8. I will check what is required to provide the Java 7 profile this week.

Great, thanks
 
What could be improved on the Virgo Tooling is an integration with build tools like Gradle or Maven. I personally prefer Gradle but Maven is nowadays the most used build tool among the Java community.
At work we develop bundles using the Eclipse PDE tooling together with your PDE2Virgo plugin and Virgo Tools. This works most of the time and is nice when you wish to be able to work in a fully IDE integrated manner. But we also maintain a Gradle build script for building our bundles on our CI server.

I'm glad to know that you are using my plug-in. You say that it works most of the time, so I would really appreciate if you could share the problems you are having when it does not work, especially since I am planning to integrate it into the Virgo tools.

Unluckily I don't know Gradle, and while I read great things about it, so far Maven has been working fine for me so I did not feel the need to look for something different.In fact, if you are developing for Virgo using PDE, it's very easy to build your bundles using Maven/Tycho. In my company we just create PDE Plug-in projects, add the PDE2Virgo nature to it to use them in Eclipse, and then create a pom.xml and list them in the parent pom.xml  to have Maven/Tycho build bundles for us. The build Job is running on Jenkins. It's quite simple, the pom.xml files for the individual bundles are almost empty and all look the same, at a point that even people who don't know Maven are able to add a new bundle to the build process.
This should be further simplified when we adopt the latest version of Tycho which support pomless plug-in projects (and generates the pom on-the-fly from the Manifest)

We also looked at Bndtools but we find this to intrusive and the Manifest generation for Spring context XML files is also not working. I know such an integration would mean a huge amount of work so having your PDE2Virgo plugin integrated in the next release as you described it would be a very good starting point.

I started using PDE for Eclipse plug-in developments 10 years ago, before knowing exactly what OSGi was, and before knowing Bndtools. At that time Tycho did not exist and we were building OSGi bundles using PDE-build. When I discovered Virgo and I tried the Virgo Tools, I was very unhappy with the way project dependencies were managed by the tooling and I came up with the PDE2Virgo hack. Personally I don't like too much the Manifest generation approach, because it's easier to introduce unwanted dependencies. I prefer the PDE approach which requires you to explicitly add an import-package to the Manifest otherwise code-completion will not work and your your code will not compile.

Thanks for your feedback.

GianMaria


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