Goomph: IDE as build artifact

Also plugins for working with SWT, OSGi, p2, and Eclipse RCP

IDE-as-build-artifact.

It is possible to have many installations of the Eclipse IDE share a common set of installed artifacts, called a "bundlepool". This means it is fast and efficient to get a purpose-built IDE for every project, preconfigured with all the plugins and settings appropriate for the project at hand.

When you run gradlew ide, it builds and downloads an IDE into build/oomphIde with just the features you need. Takes ~15 seconds and 1MB of disk space once all the common artifacts have been cached at ~/.goomph.

apply plugin: 'com.diffplug.oomph.ide'
oomphIde {
  repoEclipseLatest()
  jdt {}
  eclipseIni {
    vmargs('-Xmx2g')    // IDE can have up to 2 gigs of RAM
  }
  style {
    classicTheme()  // oldschool cool
    niceText()      // with nice fonts and visible whitespace
  }
}

See the plugin's javadoc for a quickstart, and HOW_TO_AUTOMATE_IDE.md for examples and more in-depth details.

Blog posts

• P2, Maven, and Gradle
• Parting out eclipse
• Gradle and Eclipse RCP (youtube talk 2016)

Building OSGi bundles, Eclipse plugins, and RCP applications.

It turns out that the tooling required to implement "IDE-as-build-artifact" is the same tooling required to manipulate eclipse project files, and also to build Eclipse plugins and RCP applications in the first place. That is Goomph's other side. For an example project, see the Gradle and Eclipse RCP talk.

Real world Eclipse software built with Goomph:

• DiffPlug
• Veriluma
• GenStar
• WALA
• (your project here)

Below is an index of Goomph's capabilities, along with links to the javadoc where you can find usage examples.

com.diffplug.eclipse Eclipse project files and eclipse version-mapping maven central artifacts.

• apt fixes eclipse project to work with Gradle annotation processing.
• mavencentral makes it easy to add dependency jars from an eclipse release.
• buildproperties uses build.properties to control a gradle build, and fixes eclipse project classpath to include binary assets specified in build.properties.
• excludebuildfolder excludes the gradle build folder from Eclipse's resource indexing.
• projectdeps fixes an intermittent problem where dependencies on other projects within the workspace aren't always resolved correctly within Eclipse.
• resourcefilters adds resource filters to the eclipse project.

com.diffplug.osgi Plugins for working with OSGi.

• bndmanifest generates a manifest using purely bnd, and outputs it for IDE consumption.
• equinoxlaunch can configure and run equinox applications as part of the build, such as a code generator.
• OsgiExecable makes it easy to run a chunk of code within an OSGi container, and get the result from outside the container.

com.diffplug.p2 A and plugins for manipulating p2 data.

• asmaven downloads dependencies from a p2 repository and makes them available in a local maven repository.
• P2Model models a set of p2 repositories and IUs, and provides convenience methods for running p2-director or the p2.mirror ant task against these.
• P2AntRunner runs eclipse ant tasks.
• CategoryPublisher models the CategoryPublisher eclipse application.
• FeaturesAndBundlesPublisher models the FeaturesAndBundlesPublisher eclipse application.
• Repo2Runnable models the Repo2Runnable eclipse application.