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Plug-in Development Environment
Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) provides the tools on top of the JDT to develop plugins. It is a part of Eclipse SDK Project.
To debug your plugin you might try the Core Tools
Adding 3rd Party Jar files
Option 1: turn the jars into plugins
Use New>Project>Plug-in Development>Plug-in from existing JAR archive. That will turn one or more jar files into a single jar plugin. For something like log4j you can then set up Buddy-Classloading, etc.
Before 3.2.1, you need to add to the build.properties. See Bug 146042 RCP export has problems with required plug-ins
Option 2: include the jars in a plugin
- Use Import>File System to import the jar files into your plugin project, say in the <project>/lib directory.
- Use "Add..." to add the jars to the classpath section of the PDE Editor>Runtime tab.
- Use "New..." to add "." library back (with no quotes, of course). Some versions of eclipse automatically do this for you.
- Make sure your binary build exports the new jar files on the PDE Editor>Build tab.
- Save
- On the project, use the popup menu>PDE Tools>Update Classpath to correctly add the jars to the eclipse project classpath.
- Export any packages that you need to using the PDE Editor>Runtime tab
- Save
Check out https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=108781
It talks about how adding a 3rd party jar removes the default "." classpath, and the need to add it back.
Also, eclipse can handle jars within jars. It expands them into a temporary location during runtime.