Building the Eclipse plugin for Geronimo
This section provides build instructions for the Eclipse plugin for Geronimo. For background information on this plugin, visit the IBM developerWorks article:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-gerplug/index.html
The above article refers to ongoing development of this plugin as part of Eclipse's Web Tools project. However as of recent, this is no longer, and it has been removed from WTP drivers. Instead, it is now being developed as a subproject under Apache Geronimo.
Step 1 - Software Prerequisites
WTP and its required dependencies are automatically downloaded into your local maven repository when building the plugin, so manually downloading the required WTP driver and its prerequisites is optional.
Currently, building the current source requires WTP M9 or later.
If manually downloading the dependencies, extract each of the download zips into the same root location.
WARNING: Don't use Eclipse WTP All-in-one pack, which is only available for the quite-old-now 0.7 release. Because of many breaking API changes in the past WTP releases and the recent plugin migration to the jar form, it's important to use the prerequisities listed above. You've been warned.
Step 1 - Build a server image
The first recommended step is to ensure you have a locally built server image. The geronimo eclipse plugin requires geronimo jars to be available in the local maven repository. So if you want to build the latest snapshot of the tools, you should also build the latest snapshot of the server as not all geronimo-snapshots are available for download in the remote repository.
Step 2 - Download Source
The next step is to download the source using subversion.
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/devtools/eclipse-plugin/trunk/ geronimo-eclipse-tools
Step 3 - Building
Option 1.
To automatically download prereqs, build all the source, and create the distribution zip, from the geronimo-eclipse-tools folder simply invoke:
maven build
Thats it. Skip to Step 4 for installation instructions.
Option 2.
If you have already manually download WTP and wish to use that particular driver to build against invoke:
maven -Declipse.home=/path/to/eclipse/install/dir
The eclipse.home property points to the installation directory of Eclipse (with WTP).
By default, the plugins will currently generate an image based on the Geronimo 1.0-SNAPSHOT. To specify an image for the a given milestone or release, specify the following property as well.
maven -Dgeronimo.version=1.0-M5
It is important that you build agaist the same runtime version you plan to deploy against. So if you build against the 1.0-SNAPSHOT you should also rebuild the server as well.
If there are any build errors, note the build output as well as any errors showing in the following eclipse .log file.
../geronimo-eclipse-tools/plugins/temp/.metadata/.log
Step 4 - Installing
The binary zip image will be located in ../geronimo-eclipse-tools/assembly/target/geronimo-eclipse-plugin-0.5.0-SNAPSHOT.zip. This zip file should then be extracted inside $ _. If you have extracted this zip into _$