Creating an Eclipse RCP 3.5 target platform

Some things have changed in Eclipse 3.5 regarding target platforms. At first, you don’t need to add any JDT plug-ins any more to be able to export applications using the Export wizard in the IDE. Also the validation when exporting plug-ins is much stricter now.

I published the resulting target platform as github project: eclipse_rcp_de. This is a general-purpose RCP target platform. I added the help features and plug-ins and German translations from the Babel project.

Roughly, these are the steps to create such a target platform:

• Download the RCP SDK for your main platform from the Eclipse Project Downloads page. This is the starting point for the new target platform.
• If you want to support other platforms download the DeltaPack. Add the DeltaPack plug-ins to your target platform and exchange the org.eclipse.rcp feature with the one from the DeltaPack.
• If you want to save some disk space and don’t need enhanced language features like right-to-left text, download the com.ibm.icu.base binary and source Plug-ins and replace the com.ibm.icu plug-ins with the plug-ins from this download.
• Add other plug-ins you want to include in your target platform. I usually add org.apache.commons.lang and org.eclipse.ui.forms from the Eclipse SDK.
• You need to change the org.eclipse.feature to represent the changes from the last two steps. For this, edit the feature.xml file. I changed the version to 3.5.0.customized, changed the com.ibu.icu dependency and added dependencies for the additional plug-ins. You also need to remove the signatures from the MANIFEST.MF file, because otherwise the builder will complain about the unauthorized changes.
• If you want to save some more disk space, you can remove all plug-ins and fragments for platforms you don’t support. I removed all plug-ins that are for non-x86 architectures. You also need to remove these from the feature.xml.
• If you want to support help, add the org.eclipse.help feature and all contained plug-ins from the Eclipse SDK.
• Add internationalization fragments: Download the language pack BabelLanguagePack-eclipse from the Eclipse Babel Project Downloads download page. You need to go through all plug-ins in the org.eclipse.rcp and org.eclipse.help features and check if there is a translation fragment in the language pack. These need to be copied to the target platform. I created two new features org.eclipse.rcp.de and org.eclipse.help.de that contain these fragments.

This is a quite a cumbersome process. This time I did it manually as I’m in a hurry, but I’m looking into finding a convenient way to create such a target platform or automating this process.