Geronimo Eclipse Plugin FAQ

This FAQ is broken down into two sections:

1. The Developers FAQ provides information for developers interesting in contributing to the Eclipse plugin
2. The Users FAQ is targeted for users to provide answers to common question on how to install and use the Eclipse plugin.

What is the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin?

The Geronimo Eclipse plugin provides a server adapter and other Geronimo development specific features that is built on the Web Tools Platform. The primary usage scenario for the plugin allows users to develop, build, and test application and services for the Geronimo Application Server.

Developers FAQ

Why not use the Eclipse headless PDE?

The Eclipse Plugin Development Environment is capable of running in a headless-mode to build eclipse features and plugins. This is the primary means of building eclipse plugins. However, in an effort to provide a uniform build environment across all of Apache Geronimo, it was a community decision to provide a fully mavenized build process for the eclipse plug-in.

Can you explain the contents and directory layout of the source tree?

Can I use another IDE such as NetBeans or IDEA to develop eclipse plugins?

It is not recommended. Eclipse provides a plugin development environment (PDE) and one of its key features is the creation of a specific type of launch configuration that allows plugins to be both run and debugged against a target platform. This configuration, commonly known as a runtime-workbench, launches your target platform plus any development plugins you have in your workbench. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to set up another IDE to do this.

How are dependencies to other eclipse plug-ins handled?

Since each bundle-manifest already provides dependency information to other bundles, these dependencies do not have to be respecified in each project's POM. During the build, the "Require-Bundle" attribute in each bundle manifest is processed and a maven dependency is added dynamically for every entry. During this process, each of these bundle dependencies is located inside the specified target eclipse distribution (specified in the root pom) and then installed into the local m2 repository for use by maven's dependency resolver. So essentially this mimics the PDE builder in that we build against a target platform rather then against individual dependencies.

How to I test the binary distributions?

During development you'll want to run within a runtime workspace and not use the distributions. However at times, when the distributions need to be tested they can be easily done so with your target platform.

Users FAQ

How do I install the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin?

What is a WTP project facet, and what facets does the Geronimo plugin provide?

What is the difference between creating a Geronimo runtime and a Geronimo server?

Do I need to download Geronimo?

What is the server editor?

What is a test environment?

How can I edit geronimo deployment plans?