ADT Part 2: More like the EPP

Yesterday, I posted an example of how to compose a product made up out of updatable sub-components. The first question there was about how this relates to the packages built by the EPP. The EPP packages are just products, much like my ADT. They use their own feature and plugin to brand the Eclipse package and do things like open a different default perspective.

The EPP packages are built slightly different from my first example. They use feature requirements to get version ranges for the sub-components, but they don't currently perform the extra director calls to make those sub-components into updatable roots.

Here is another example that is structured a bit more like the EPP packages.
This example is also available in cvs with the first (dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/eclipse/pde-build-home/examples/adt.feature.builder).

[Edit 2013/07/03: Eclipse CVS has migrated to git starting in 2010.  The examples are now available under the examples folder in http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/pde/eclipse.pde.build.git. The example has not been updated to work with git and may require modifications.]

Features instead of p2.inf

In our first example, we used a p2.inf file to add requirements with version ranges to our product. I did it this way because I didn't have anything to add to the product, and didn't want to bother creating a feature.

Perhaps a more familiar way of doing things would have been to use a feature. So we create a feature "adt.feature", and instead of including our sub-components, we require them using a "compatible" match rule:



I also made my feature include the "org.eclipse.platfom" feature. The adt.product file then just includes adt.feature. We no longer need the p2.inf to add requirements to our product.

Adding Branding

Since we created our own feature for this product, we may as well take the next step and add our own branding plug-in. The first thing I did way create my own product extension in the plugin.xml:

    <extension id="product" point="org.eclipse.core.runtime.products">
      <product application="org.eclipse.ui.ide.workbench" name="ADT Product">
         <property name="aboutText" value="Andrew's Development Tools"/>
         <property name="windowImages" value="icons/icon.gif"/>
         <property name="aboutImage" value="product.gif"/>
      </product>
   </extension>

Note that the word 'product' here is slightly overloaded. There is a 'org.eclipse.core.runtime.products' extension point that defines branding for eclipse, and there is the product itself which is what we are building using the .product file.

This product is just running the normal workbench application, but it uses my own icons and images. We then change our adt.product file to use adt.plugin.product instead of the org.eclipse.platform.ide product extension we were using before.

In my adt.feature I set the branding plug-in to be my new adt.plugin. I also provide the normal about.* files so that my feature shows up in the about dialog.

As a final touch, I made my own splash screen.

Building the new Product

The build script is essentially unchanged from the first example. So I won't bother explaining the details again. The only difference is that I made some minor changes to the builder's build.properties file so that pde.build can find our feature and plugin.



Note that PDE/Build does not follow feature requirements when performing a build and publishing metadata. This means that for the director install to work, you need to have pre-existing metadata for the things that you are requiring. This same requirement exists with the first example where we used a p2.inf file.