I am looking for the best practice of handling inter project dependencies between mixed project types where some of the projects are eclipse plug-in/OSGI bundle projects (an RCP application) and others are just plain old java projects (web services modules). Few of the eclipse plug-ins have dependencies on Java projects.
My problem is that at least as far as I’ve looked, there is no way of cleanly expressing such a dependency in Eclipse PDE environment. I can have plug-in projects depend on other plug-in projects (via Import-Package or Require-Bundle manifest headers), but not of the plain java projects.
I seem to be able to have project declare a dependency on a jar from another project in a workspace, but these jar files do not get picked up by neither export nor launch configuration (although, java code editing sees the libraries just fine).
The “Java projects” are used for building services to be deployed on an J2EE container (JBoss 4.2.2 for the moment) and produce in some cases multiple jar’s – one for deploying to the JBoss ear and another for use by client code (an RCP application).
The way we’ve “solved” this problem for now is that we have 2 more external tools launcher configurations – one for building all the jar’s and another for copying these jar’s to the plug-in projects. This works (sort of), but the “whole build” and “copy jars” targets incur quite a large build step, bypassing the whole eclipse incremental build feature and by copying the jars instead of just referencing the projects I am decoupling the dependency information and requesting quite a massive workspace refresh that eats up the development time like it was candy.
What I would like to have is a much more “natural” workspace setup that would manage dependencies between projects and request incremental rebuilds only as they are needed, be able to use client code from service libraries in an RCP application plug-ins and be able to launch the RCP application with all the necessary classes where they are needed.
So can I have my cake and eat it too 😉
NOTE
To be clear, this is not so much about dependency management and module management at the moment as it is about Eclipse PDE configuration.
I am well aware of products like [Maven], [Ivy] and [Buckminster] and they solve a quite different problem (once I’ve solved the workspace configuration issue, these products can actually come in handy for materializing the workspace and building the product)
I never did it so this is a theoretical approach. But I’d try a dependency management system like ivy or maven2.
Since maven2 does much more, then just dependency management, I’d recommend ivy in this case.