Eclipse PDE Build Screencast

Last year I put together a screencast on the Eclipse PDE build process. PDE is the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment. It’s a set of tools for developing Eclipse plugins and OSGi bundles. It may surprise some to learn that you can use these tools “outside” of the Eclipse IDE as part of an Ant build (for example). This allows for headless builds and continuous integration. However, using the PDE in this context is not always straightforward. In this screencast, I share the layout and approach we used. We didn’t follow the documented PDE build process exactly, and in there are certainly areas for improvement in the tutorial code, but it should be a decent starting point for anyone deailing with Eclipse build issues. These instructions are specific to Eclipse 3.2 and some changes may be necessary to apply the code to other versions of PDE.

• Screencast on Google Video
• Source code on SourceForge

I know the quality of the Google Video version isn’t very good. There’s a full quality version included in the SourceForge download. The download also includes additional documentation and notes as well as the full source code and necessary dependencies. Enjoy!