This is the last part of my Galileo Reviews around Target Platforms. An Overview of this blog series can be found here.
Plug-ins inside IDE and Target Platform
If you followed my blogs then you know which of your Plug-ins (Bundles) belong to the IDE and wich to the Target Platform, where they come from and where they will be stored:
You also know which Eclipse Views can help you to control IDE Plug-ins:
…and also the Views to control the Plug-ins of your Target Platforms:
You can read in detail about this in these previous posts:
- Cool Views to control Bundles (Plug-ins) defining your IDE
- Cool Views to control Bundles (Plug-ins) defining a Target Platform
3rdParty Bundles of Target Platform from Directories
If you’re working with 3rdParty Bundles without Update Sites then you have to store these Bundles in Directories.
Your Target Definition file contains the path of these directories. We already have talked about storing Target definition files inside your workspace and to put them under Source Control (CVS, SVN, …) to make it easier to share them. But there’s another problem sharing these definitions if they contain pathes to your local target directory.
Here’s my tip how to solve this:
1. Go to Eclipse Preferences Run/Debug String Substitution and add a new Variable describing the Path to the Root directory of your Target Platform Directories:
2. Use the String Substitution Variable in your Target Platform Definition:
Now your Target Platform Definitions can easy be used on different computers and OS.
Galileo reviews will continue…
I hope my blogs about Target Platforms in Galileo are of any help to you defining Target Platforms or perhaps even to start using Target Platforms.
There will be some more Galileo Reviews around Plug-in Development (PDE). …stay tuned…
My life as Software Architect and Enterprise Application developer is not limited to RCP, OSGI, EJB … – to have real fun I’m working model-driven.
openArchitectureWare (oAW) projects (MWE, Xpand / Xtend, Xtext) were moved from openarchitectureware.org to eclipse.org and part of Galileo 🙂
Now I have to migrate my MDSD projects and the experiences and HowTo’s will be the topics of my next Galileo reviews.
mobile && more 
Hi Ekke
pretty nice blog! valuable info.
I wonder though, if you found a way to let pde-build use your target platform definition. As far as I know (yet), pde-build can only handle a single folder. Do I miss something?
just found your comment as “pending to approve” – sorry for delay.
no – I didn’t found a way (yet) to let pde-build use target platform definition.
hi ekke
thanks for the reply.
That’s unfortunate 😦 I found an article in the Eclipse magazine (June 09) in the meantime. It reported this issue. The proposed solution’s practicable but not very handy: create an ANT-script that copies the various sources of the target platform to a single folder. I guess that’s where you’d duplicate the logic behind the target platform fragmentation: Once in the IDE, a second time in the ant-script. Not very neat if you think at the ‘troubles’ keeping both in sync).