Migrating to Maven 3 and Eclipse Tycho

First refactoring I decided to introduce was the automation of the build process using Apache Maven.

The reason is overhead of using Eclipse PDE every time to build an application. With it we must do export every time to build distribution packages. Also, it is not easy to do builds for multiple platforms using Eclipse PDE.

And the solution is Maven 3 and a set of plugins called Eclipse Tycho. These tools allow to build eclipse plugins and applications in head-less mode simply in command line.

Tycho brings a lot of useful features with it:

• headless build
• JUnit integration tests support
• dependency management (a bit unhandy)
• continious integration support
• reports generation and other maven features

So, we migrated to Tycho-driven build process. Migration was succesful, but list of modules (previously Eclipse projects) changed, due to attempts to introduce JUnit testing modules.

Later I will write a bit more about Tycho-related issues.