Creating an Eclipse RCP 3.5 target platform

As I recommend using a stripped-down target platform containing only required plugins for RCP development, I just had to update the target platform for my German Eclipse RCP training courses to Eclipse 3.5.

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.

Schulungen

• Eclipse RCP (20.09.2010 - 24.09.2010, Hamburg)
• git (07.10.2010 - 08.10.2010, Essen)

Eclipse RCP

• Do bug bounties foster open source collaboration?
• Building OSGi based applications
• Privately building SWTBot on Hudson for OS X, Windows and Linux
• Git In Action - Which features do you want to see in my screencast?
• The test-driven Eclipse RCP course
• Eclipse RCP examples
• Iterate over a JFace selection in a for each loop
• Headless Eclipse RCP builds with Buckminster and Hudson
• Developing Eclipse RCP applications following the MVC pattern
• Tutorial: p2 updates for Eclipse RCP applications
• Contributing commands to context menus
• Eclipse Riena Tutorial
• Building tables made easy: TableViewerBuilder
• Tutorial: Spring OSGi + Eclipse RCP
• Adding a command with a key binding for an editor
• Showing menu contributions depending on active perspective
• Creating an Eclipse RCP 3.5 target platform
• Toggle Handler for Eclipse Commands
• SWT/XML project started
• Eclipse RCP recipes: Automatically switch to a preferred perspective