Buckminster/UserSeries/Getting Started

Getting Started

Welcome to Buckminster. So you've heard a little about it and would like to investigate further. This is the page to start. Here we'll talk about the what exactly Buckminster does, what the basic concepts are and why you might like to use it.

Introduction to Buckminster

Buckminster is an interesting concept to explain, but if you have ever found yourself building software and spending forever trawling for dependencies to get it to compile, then read on. If you are in an organisation with a complicated set of dependencies and build orders then you this is also for you. Buckminster wont solve all your problems, but with the help of this series of wiki pages you should be very clear what it can do for you and where you'll need to invest extra effort.

Buckminster at a glance

It's a java based tool that can resolve dependencies. So if you have a project you want to build, as a build engineer setting up buckminster you'll need to spend some time configuring it so it can resolve those dependencies correctly. You will do that by defining a cquery and rmap file which we will cover later. Then you run a buckminster application that points at that file then materializes all those dependencies into an eclipse workspace.

It's embedded very tightly into eclipse and works really well if you are building simple OSGi based stuff. You can use it headless, that is from a command line for automated builds, or you can invoke it directly from within the eclipse IDE. Either way you end up with an eclipse workspace populated with the results of the materialisation. This your source code with all its dependants ready for compilation.

It can build stuff for you using eclipse's PDE. But it can also invoke ant and maven scripts as well using actors. We'll focus more on using the eclipse PDE but later on we will turn our attention to why you might need to call out to ant or other build system.