PDEBuildTutorial

Outline of the tutorial for eclipsecon 2007

1) Overview - What does PB do? Why to use PB? - Overview of the main functionality - Overview of the major steps handled by the build

2) Scenario driven presentation of the PB features 2.a) The simplest build

In this section we demystify the complexity: within a few minutes you can be up and running. The demonstration is done from scratch in front of the people. For this simple case the code is local.
We describe what is being done, and explain the underlying key concepts (locations, properties file, etc...).
For setting up this example we use the templates provided with PDE Build.
What is covered in this section:
  - shape of folders on disk (locations: baselocation, build direc, builder)
  - templates
  - simple properties to setup
  - relationship build.properties / build.xml
  - generated files and how do they relate (ordering - sequence diagram)
  - setting up the base

Note on the example: it contains qualifier, because it is a good practice and will be useful later on.

2.b) Getting the source from a repository and setting up the base

 Present the concept of map files.
 1) Fetching source from CVS
      basic properties
      introduce the concept of map files and show that the tag is used to replace the qualifier
 2) Fetching source from another repo plugged through the extension point
      modifying the customTargets.xml.
      What is the custom target used for?

 3) Fetching the base
    Using the default mechanism and see how it can be done in the customTargets.

2.c) Building an RCP product

In this case we are showing how to perform a build from a .product file. 
This allows us to present the support for:
  - multiple platforms
  - product build.xml
  - controlling the output (naming the file and archive format)
  - dealing with root files

2.d) Extracting out part of our product from the RCP product archive

  - extract something out of our product.
   optimizing build with pacakger?
  - this shows how to use the packager.

3) Building in the real life

this section allows us to cover more advanced topics (to be picked from the topics section below), talks a little bit of good practices and recommended infrastructure.

List of problems

===========

tag is wrong file not found plugin not found

 manifest

path length errors no code in the problem reading the output format circularity problem

Tips and tricks

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- how to debug the whole build - building faster - organizing features - do not using the recommended shape - multiple platform - generating features and plugins in the IDE - ordering features

Topics

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- setting up JREs - versionning feature version suffixes, good practices, properties files with the actual versions being used, input files. - source features - feature ordering / dependencies - output format management

	pack200, signing, jnlp, update, 
       delta packs, grouping
       jar / unjar'ed

- building doc - additional jars - disconnect of the file and UI. - custom Target for plugins and features (using the doc as an example) - build infrastructure - use Java 5 - controlling compilation