Home/ Questions/Q 7742941
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-01T09:24:23+00:00

I’m trying to build an Eclipse plugin that depends on a library which has

  • 0

I’m trying to build an Eclipse plugin that depends on a library which has to be distributed separate to it. The reasons for that are:

  1. It’s a commercial library, while the plugin will be distributed freely. Also, most people won’t need it and we don’t want to confuse users.
  2. There are currently at least two versions of the library in use and we don’t want to build two different versions of the plugin. The interface is compatible, so we can ship just one version of the plugin.

The plugin is for an Eclipse-based development environment and the purpose is to provide our library’s functionality within that environment. The library itself depends on other free components, which I can bundle with it without a problem.

Since I don’t know if I’m allowed to say exactly which library it is, but I must keep this unambiguous, let’s call the library “L” and the plugin I’m trying to develop “P”.

I’m using the bnd tool for this and so far I’ve tried both packaging L as a standalone plugin, and as a plugin fragment.

As a standalone plugin, it was accepted by the host eclipse environment and I could list it as a dependency of P and successfully build that. However, at runtime the P plugin didn’t see resources from the L library on its classpath. Mainly those in META-INF/services are needed.

Next, I tried packaging L as a plugin fragment for P. I hoped this would work, since the specs say, that a fragment’s classpath is merged with its host plugin’s. This didn’t work, because I couldn’t use the classes from L as build dependencies of P – putting L in eclipse’s plugins directory didn’t result in it being recognised as an installed plugin.

So I’m stuck. I need L’s jars as part of P’s runtime and build classpath, while at the same time having them in a separate plugin. Is what I’m trying to do even possible?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For P to have visibility of L’s resources, L must export the containing folders as ‘packages’ and P must import them. This looks a bit inelegant but does allow folders like META-INF/services to be on P’s classpath.

    Alternatively, for META-INF/services in particular, you could look at new function in release 5 of the Enterprise OSGi spec in the area of ServiceLoaders. A good blog explaining the idea is http://coderthoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/javautilserviceloader-in-osgi.html, and Apache Aries has an early implementation.

    • 0