Hi all,
Let me start by saying that this is a mostly theoretical question. It is
unlikely that (at the moment) I have either the skill or the time to
work on any of this...
I've been looking at the old GroovySWT SwtBuilder. This component turns
out to be quite tricky to build, due to the dependencies on various
Eclipse libraries, and the fact that the build system seems to be set up
to use maven. Specifically, the SwtBuilder has the following dependencies:
- org.eclipse.swt
- found an up-to-date repo for this at
http://swt-repo.googlecode.com/svn/repo/ - also available as a standalone download from eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.jface,
http://swt-repo.googlecode.com/svn/repo/, no
standalone download from eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.jface.databinding, can't find a repo, no standalone
download from eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.core.commands, repo available, no standalone download from
eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.core.databinding
- org.eclipse.core.databinding.*, no repo, no standalone download from
eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.osgi, repo available, no standalone download from eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.equinox.common, repo available, no standalone download
from eclipse.org
- org.eclipse.ui.forms, no repo, no standalone download from eclipse.org
This list isn't complete I know, but I hope it illustrates the problem
in setting up a good build environment *and distribution*. You basically
need a full Eclipse install, then find the relevant jars and copy them
out of the eclipse installation directory in order to make a standalone
distribution for SwtBuilder, or include complex installation
instructions so users can do that extraction themselves. The current
SwtBuilder source tree seems to solve this by including its own local
maven repository *inside the eclipse project* that has copies of the
relevant libraries, but from a very old Eclipse version (<=2009).
No, as I see it, there is a use case for an SwtBuilder that only depends
on SWT, not on most of the rest of the dependencies. Most of those other
dependencies are introduced because of the separate JFace and Forms
functionality in SwtBuilder. So it would be nice if we could refactor
SwtBuilder somehow so that it can be build to only have a run-time
dependency on SWT, and have JFace and Forms functionality only
'switched' on when the other relevant libraries are actually available
in the classpath. That "switch on" could be done dynamically (eg some
check to see if the relevant jars are available at runtime and otherwise
throw a RuntimeException), or require some explicit enablement in the
SwtBuilder API to tell groovy "JFace should be available", possibly with
some static type-checking thrown in so that groovy can complain at
compile time if you try to use JFace but you haven't switched it on and
you haven't included the relevant jars in your classpath.
Is something like this possible with a FactoryBuilderSupport based Builder?
On a side note, it appears that Groovy is now completely build using
Gradle, so would it make sense to update SwtBuilder as well to move from
maven to gradle? (I only know the theory behind maven & gradle, have no
practical experience with either of them, so....)
Maarten
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