I'm looking for some best practices to rollout/setup a complete project setup with Eclipse to my dev team.
It's a maven based project that will work without Eclipse. But we want to distribute a preconfigure Eclipse version that have all plugins installed, we want to have a local update site to rollout update of this setup and so on.
Is there any good way to achieve this kind of setup? I know that i can provide a update site which contain some plugins, but can i define a set of plugins?
Is it possible that Eclipse pmd, Checkstyle, Findbugs and the code formatter use the settings from Maven?
Here are the two most important questions for me:
How to define a plugin set for an Eclipse installation, so that all developers have the same set of plugins installed.
Any way to use the configurations from pmd, Findbugs, Checkstyle and code formatter from Maven to be used inside eclipse
I had similar issues some time ago. Setting up eclipse with a bunch of plugins is really annoying. proko mentioned a plugin I didn't know, so I compared it to the solution I am using right now.
After 15 minutes of installing, trying it out and reading the doc, I gave up because it seems too heavyweighted for my needs.
The solution I am using myself is yatta Profiles: http://profiles.yatta.de
Especially your first requirement can be tackled with it. You can install all the plugins your team needs, click on a button to upload the configuration, and send the link to your team. Your colleagues just have to download your profile. All plugins will be installed automatically.
Here’s a link to an Eclipse profile with the plugins you mentioned (pmd, checkstyle, findbugs, maven): https://marketplace.yatta.de/profiles/a7Ig
Beside of your Eclipse installation via update site, here a possible plugin to manage configurations (question 2):
To distribute any settings of 'window-preference' to your whole dev team I can recomment 'workspace mechanics'.
You can record your settings and then provide them via your dev server.
If you distribute a shared Eclipse it's also easy to provide the proper workspace mechanics URL for any Eclipse installation (see Enterprise Configuration of Workspace mechanic).
Changes to the settings are checked on startup and the developers are always up to date.
Further information can be found on the official project page: https://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/workspacemechanic/
This is part of a Development-Handbook in your Team!
All important plugins contains support for external configuration, also checkstyle, code-formatter and findbugs.
Distribute those configurations in a single website.
code-formatter: Open window->preferernces Java>Code-style>formatter -> Import and specify the configuration from a website you created (its a file dialog but you can specify uri's also).
Checkstyle: Open window->preferernces>Checkstyle and press New ... then choose External Configuration File
Findbugs: similar to Checkstyle.
There is no other way. We use a wiki to distribute the Development-Handbook and the Configuration.
Related
So I installed Apache Netbeans. Installed some of the plugins and instead of just seeing the Java folder in the categories when I want to create a new Project, I see this:
What is Gradle, Ant, and Maven? I am not familiar with Java and wanted to study the language, but I have no idea of what these are.
I keep seeing that I need to have certain plug ins installed and active.
Here they are.
Ant, Maven and Gradle are Java build tools. You don't really need to know the exact differences though.
Java with Ant
The "Java with Ant" option uses NetBeans' own internal project format (based on Ant). In older NetBeans versions this category was simply called "Java"
If you don't need to share your project with non-NetBeans users, use that option.
You will have to manage dependent libraries yourself (download, add them to the project) unless you are only using libraries and frameworks that are bundled with NetBeans. The turnaround times (the time it takes between you hit "Run" and the application actually starts) are the shortest with this option, as Maven and Gradle add substantial overhead to that.
Java with Maven
Maven is a standardized dependency and build management tool. A project defined with Maven can be used by everybody else as it automatically manages (and downloads) any dependency.
Use that option if you know you need to share your project with other people (e.g. hand it in your school or university).
Java with Gradle
Gradle is yet another build tool, which also manages dependencies for your and has more flexibility than Maven. However the build scripts are less standardized than in Maven. But that is also a good option if you know that you need to share your project with other people.
Unless you are using NetBeans 11.1 (which is currently in Beta) I would not use this option as Gradle support in older versions is not as good as Ant or Maven support.
You might want to go through the tutorials on the NetBeans homepage:
http://netbeans.apache.org/help/index.html
I work with a partner in java programming, I use intellij and he uses Eclipse.
Is there a way that we can somehow mutually share our code with each other so we could work on the same code each in our own time?
Thanks
There is that possibility using GIT or another Code repository. Look at https://github.com/
or https://bitbucket.org/. There is also very helpfull article.
To be also independant you can simply integrate your code with Maven, both incellij and eclipse can import project based only on pom.xml file created in maven setup.
In this your should use repository when there are more than one programmer on a single project whether you are using even same IDE. SVN will be one of the choices for repository
Given that you guys need to implement version control, one important aspect of co-operating together is to keep your codebase IDE-agnostic.
Thankfully, with java and maven there is an easy way to do this.
Firstly, commit to building your project with a build tool such as maven. Therefore, using this example, the pom.xml is the master configuration file for your project.
In contrast, your "project" files (either your .idea folder for intellij or your .project, .classpath and related files for eclipse) should not be checked into version control at all.
You can then add "ignores" to your VCS so that IDE-specific configuration files are not checked in - this way you won't interfere with each other with IDE-specific things.
Then, it is relatively easy for both of you to share a maven (pom.xml) based project with each other, and to configure your IDE independently from each other (i.e.: locally).
I have an Eclipse project (which is generated via a maven archetype and requires m2e) that I want to deploy to many users. Currently the way I'm telling them to do it is extremely manual, (i.e. download this plugin, download that plugin, download this m2e connector). Is there a way to write down plugin dependencies somewhere in my project so that when the project is imported Eclipse will tell the user "This project depends on you having these Eclipse plugins installed, would you like Eclipse to auto-fetch the plugins for you?"
Please read about deploying eclipse plugins first, all of that is available in the basic infrastructure of eclipse.
Whenever you install something via the update manager in eclipse, you don't install plugins as such, but instead you install features, which are groups of plugins plus dependencies to other features. So you have to do 2 things when creating a feature for your plugin:
List all dependent features in the feature editor.
On the tab "Sites to visit" you have to list the update site URLs of the dependent features.
P2 update manager will auto-magically discover everything needed during the installation process of your plugin afterwards.
Yes there are several tools created by Eclipse member companies (both with free to use and for-pay editions) that will do exactly what you want. Both products have the notion of "profiles" that is a pre-set configuration of Eclipse plugins (basically one of the available packages plus a bunch of plugins). Then once you have this profile configured you can freely share it with our team via email or whatever sharing mechanism the products provide. Once your team members accept and start "using" the profile those software products will provision exactly what dependencies everyone needs to run your Eclipse projects.
Pulse from Genuitec
They have a Community edition and a Managed Team edition based on your team's needs.
Yoxos from EclipseSource
They have a free plan if you want to share your profiles publicly. If you want to keep them private they have a pricing plan for that.
Not sure how much help this is, but why not use the Eclipse Marketplace if it is available. Saves you the effort to manually download and install the plugin.
Sourceforge.net has a filter for Java projects, but I'm looking for a way to narrow them down to ones that are meant to be built in Eclipse.
Edit I'm using Eclipse Metrics and Omondo plug-ins to analyze open-source Java projects. I'm looking for a quick way to find Eclipse open-source projects that can build quickly in Eclipse, so I can use these tools on them for analysis.
I presume that a project that is "meant to be built in Eclipse" is one that has an Eclipse .project file and other stuff checked into the source repository.
First, checking in Eclipse-specific stuff can a bad idea because it is easy to include stuff (e.g. build pathnames, preferences) that are specific to the developer. You then get problems if there are multiple committers ...
Second, this should unnecessary. Most of the stuff in the .project file can be generated when you import the project. If that's not possible, then the project should provide instructions for setting up the buildpath etcetera. (Note that if the project uses Maven, this is all taken care of for you.)
Third, any project worth its salt will include build scripts of some kind that allow you to rebuild without using any IDE.
Finally, any project that only supports building using Eclipse is excluding the significant subset of developers who use other Java IDEs.
Note that neither Maven or Ant builds require Eclipse to work. Both of these build tools can run from the command line, or from other Java IDEs.
OK. I understand your requirements now. You don't actually care what the project is ... or that it is sound / worthwhile project. You just need it for testing your plugin. (I won't comment on the "validity" of doing this. It depends on what you hope to achieve.)
I suggest that you install the m2eclipse plugin and look for projects with a "pom.xml" file. The projects don't need to be eclipse specific. The m2eclipse plugin automatically creates the ".project", ".classpath" and so on based on the "pom.xml" file. There's no need to exclude any particular version control system, because the m2eclipse plugin can import Maven projects that you checked out from the command line.
We have several products which have a lot of shared code and which must be maintained several versions back.
To handle this we use a lot of Eclipse projects, some contain library jars, and some contain shared source code (in several projects to avoid getting a giant heap with numerous dependencies while being able to compile everything from scratch to ensure that source and binaries are consistent). We manage those with projectSet.psf's as these can directly pull all projects out from CVS and leave a fully prepared workspace. We do not do ant builds directly or use maven.
We now want to be able to put all these projects and their various versions in a Continous Integration tool - I like Hudson but this is just a matter of taste - which essentially means that we need to get an automatic way to check out the projects to a fresh workspace, and compile the source folders as described in the project-files in each project. Hudson does not provide such an approach to build a project, so I have been considering what the best way to approach this would be.
Ideas have been
Find or write an ant plugin/converter that understands projectSet.psf's and map to cvs-checkout and compile tags.
Create the build.xml files from within Eclipse and use those. I tried this, and found the result to be verbose and with absolute locations which is not good with automatic tools putting files where they want to.
Write a Hudson plugin which understands projectSet.psf's to derive a configuration and build it.
Just bite the bullet and manually create and update the CI configuration whenever stuff breaks - I don't like this :)
I'd really like to hear about other peoples experiences so I can decide how to approach this.
Edit: Another option might be using a CI which knows better about Eclipse projects and/or project sets. We are not religious - this is just a matter of getting stuff running without having to do everything ourselves. Would Cruise Control be a better option perhaps? Others?
Edit: Found that ant4eclipse has a "Team Project Set" facility. http://ant4eclipse.sourceforge.net/
Edit: Used the ant4eclipse and ant-contrib ant extensions to build a complete workspace as a sjgned runnable jar file similar to the Runnable Jar facility in Eclipse 3.5M6. I am still depending on Eclipse to create the initial empty workspace, and extract the ProjectSet, so that is the next hurdle.
Edit: Ended up with a dual configuration, namely that Hudson extracts the same set of modules as listed in the ProjectSet.pdf file from CVS (which needs to have the same tag) causing them to be located next to each other. Then ant4eclipse works well with the projectSet.psf file embedded in the main module. Caveat: Module list in Hudson must be manually updated, and it appears that a manual workspace cleanup is needed afterwards to let Hudson "discover" that there is more projects now than earlier. This has now worked well for us for a couple of months, but it was quite tedious to get everything working inside the ant file.
Edit: The "Use Team Projects" with ant4eclipse and a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C in Project Panel with a Ctrl-V in the CVS projects in Hudson has turned out to work well enough for us to live with (for mature projects this is very rarely changed). I am awaiting the release of ant4eclipse 1.0 - http://www.ant4eclipse.org/, currently in milestone 2 - to see how much homegrown functionality can be replaced with ant4eclipse things.
Edit: ant4eclipse is as of 20100609 in M4 so the schedule at http://www.ant4eclipse.org/node?page=1 is slipping somewhat.
Edit: My conclusion after using our ant4eclipse approach for a longer period is that the build script get very gnarly and is hard to maintain. Also the Team ProjectSet facility (which ant4eclipse use to locate the projects) which works well for CVS based repositories, but not after we migrated to git (which is a big thing in itself). New projects will most likely be based on maven, as this has good support in Jenkins.
I'm not completely sure I understand the problem, but it sounds like the root issue is that you have many projects, some of which are dependent on others. Some of the projects that are closer to the "leaf" of the dependency tree need to be able to use "stable" (or previously "released") versions of the more "core" projects.
I solve exactly this problem using Hudson, ant, and ivy. I follow a pattern demonstrated by Clark in Pragmatic Project Automation (he doesn't demonstrate the dependency problems and solutions, and he uses CruiseControl rather than hudson.)
I have a hand-written ant build file (we call it "cc-build.xml", because of our CruiseControl roots.) This file is responsible for refreshing the working space for the project from the CM repository and labeling the contents for future reference. It then hands off control to another hand-written ant build file (build.xml) that is provided by each project's developers. This project is responsible for the traditional build steps (compile, packaging, etc.) It is required to spit out the installable artifacts, unit test reports, etc, to the Hudson artifacts directory. It is my experience that automatically generated build files (by Eclipse or other similar IDE's) will never get close to getting this sufficiently robust for use in a CI scenario.
Additionally, it uses ivy to resolve its own dependencies. Ivy supports precisely-specified dependency versions (e.g. "use version 1.1") and it supports "fuzzy versions" (e.g. "use version 1.1+" or "use the latest version in integration status.") Our projects typically start out specifying a very "fuzzy" version for internal projects under ongoing development, and as they get close to a release point, they "freeze" the dependency version so that stuff stops moving underneath them.
The non-leaf projects (projects that are dependents for other projects) also use ivy to publish their artifacts to our internal ivy repository. That repository keeps all past builds of the dependents, so that any project can always depend on any other previous version.
Lastly, each project in Hudson is configured to have a build trigger that causes a rebuild when any of its dependent projects successfully build. This causes them to get built again with the (possibly) new ivy dependent version.
It is worth noting that once you get this up and running, consistent automated "labeling" or "tagging" of an automated build's inputs is going to be critical for you - otherwise troubleshooting post-build problems is going to result in having to untangle a hornet's nest to find the original source.
Getting all of this setup for our environment took quite a bit of effort (primarily in setting up the ivy repository and ant build files,) but it has paid for itself many times over in saved headaches in manually managing the dependencies and decreased troubleshooting effort.
Write a Hudson plugin which
understands projectSet.psf's to derive
a configuration and build it.
That seems like the winning answer to me.
I work with CruiseControl rather than Hudson but in my experience if you can create a plugin that solves your problem it will quickly payoff. And it is generally pretty easy to write a plugin that is custom fit for your solution as opposed to one that needs to work for everyone in a similar situation.
I have tried both Cruise Control (CC) and Hudson for our CI solution. We (as a company) decided on Hudson. But for your question "Does CC support Eclipse project build" the answer is no as far as I know. CC supports many more different build tools and Source Control systems but it is a bit more difficult to configure and use. As for Hudson, it is more simple to configure and use it. We developed our custom plugins for both CC and Hudson for the parts of our build cycle that they do not provide as is. As for plugin development, if you know / use Maven, Hudson is simpler too. But if you are not familiar to Maven, first you need to learn the basic usage of maven to successfully develop a Hudson plugin. But once you understand the basic usage of maven, plugin development, test and even debug is simpler in Hudson.
For your specific problem, I can think of a solution that makes use of Eclipse plugins as well. You can develop your own Eclipse plugin that for instance gets the psf files from a (configurable) folder, and use Eclipse internals to process these psf's. I mean you can use existing Eclipse source codes that takes a psf file, check-outs it's project definitions and compile these projects. This Eclipse plugin of yours may have a preference page (which you can access by Eclipse -> Window -> Preferences) and configure which folder it will use to look for psf files. Your Eclipse plugin should also have a way to start psf processing without user interaction. For this, you can use ipc to trigger your process. I mean your Eclipse plugin can listen for a port, and you can write another java application that will connect to your plugin through this port and trigger its process. As for CI part, you can use either CC or Hudson and use their external process execution support. If you are using Windows, you can write a bat file (for Linux sh file) that first launchs Eclipse that has your plugin installed. Then it launches your java application that will communicate with your Eclipse plugin to trigger your process. From your CI tool you will need to run your bat / sh file to trigger your process.