PDE builds or Maven

1. Ankur Sharma
ankur.sharma2@emc.com
@ankur_sharma
blog.ankursharma.org

2. WHO AM I?
Ex-committer and co-lead to Eclipse PDE project
Currently employed with EMC2
Dealing with Eclipse for last 8 years now

4. BUILDS ARE NOT EASY
Challenges
• Dependencies
• Versions
• Streams/Branches – I,N,M
• CI

5. PDE BUILDS
• Eclipse plug-ins (and OSGi bundles) treated as first rate citizens
• Eclipse style Versioning
• Understands PDE artifacts
• build.properties
• Ant based

6. TANTRUMS
• Dependency hell
• Third party dependencies
• Multiple Target platforms
• Insufficient active development
• Bloated builds
• 32 bit and 64 bit builds?
• Didn’t work too well with Git

7. NOT ALL IS LOST
• Use build.properties preferences
• Api Baseline
• Make use of API Use scans

8. MAVEN
• Language independent
• Dependency management is the core
• Modular artifacts instead of interpreted scripts
• Extensible architecture

9. HIGH MAINTENANCE?
• Cumbersome pom.xml
• Doesn’t understands Eclipse artifacts – plug-ins, bundles,
features, site
• Eclipse builds depends on Tycho and m2e
• Ignores PDE artifacts like build,properties
• Eclipse integration is not fully baked yet
• Tycho does its own packaging
• .m2 cache

10. THEN WHY?
• Dependence management
• Ability to easily churn out Snapshot and Release builds
• Works well with Git, Perforce and other SCMs
• Can hide Target Platform menace using custom repositories like
Jfrog Artifactory

11. BEST CHOICE?
• There is no silver bullet
• PDE Builds for simpler and small applications
• Maven for complex and heavy applications.
• Use Maven for CI
• Keep light weight PDE infrastructure at hand for running local
tests and builds