Is it currently possible to build Eclipse Plugins by Maven AND have nice IDE Integration?

Question

I\'m currently evaluating maven to improve our build process. The building and creating of normal jar files works so far, although I\'m not entirely happy with the Maven IDE

Answer 1

Are you dead set on using maven to build your RCP apps? I ask this because, from my experience using maven to build anything more than trivial RCP apps can be quite a pain. When I started working on RCP applications I initially investigated using maven as a build solution, but found out that the support for eclipse builds within maven was very basic at the time. Also, some co-workers of mine are using maven for another RCP based project in our company, and while the support for eclipse has gotten better, they had to jump through some hoops to get it to work to their liking. So, my opinion is that for now, stick to using the ant based pde build for your RCP applications.

Answer 2

Tycho does what you need. Now in 2012, it is mature and usable set of maven plugins. I can only recommend it.

The quality of the documentation has obviously not changed very much since 2009. It may be difficult to get Tycho running. We managed to understand Tycho and we've been successfully using it for building a considerably large Eclipse RCP application for more than a year and a half. We adopted a manifest-first approach, where all the plugin(project) dependencies are defined in MANIFEST.MF. The final product of our build is an executable application and also a p2 site for easy updates. All done by maven build.