Ruby script to install JFace JARs into your local Maven repository

After figuring out how to use Maven to write SWT applications, I figured it was time to tackle JFace.

If you read through the JFace wiki page above, though, it says that to use JFace + SWT outside of Eclipse we basically have to locate several dependencies, namely:

• org.eclipse.core.commands_<version info>.jar
• org.eclipse.equinox.common_<version info>.jar
• org.eclipse.jface_<version info>.jar
• org.eclipse.osgi_<version info>.jar
• org.eclipse.ui.workbench_<version info>.jar

All of these are available in the standard installation of Eclipse IDE in the ${ECLIPSE_HOME}/plugins directory.

Now, it would be a 10 minute job to manually search for, copy and paste the actual JAR filenames and execute the Maven commands to install those into the local repository with proper group and artifact ids.

Since I’m ‘lazy’, though, instead of 10 minutes I decided to spend a couple of hours writing a Ruby script to do this all for me (I originally started to write it in bash but I realized it’d be a lot easier in Ruby).

Here it is.

Writing Eclipse SWT apps using Maven

I’ve been trying to get my feet wet writing code for the Eclipse platform. I figured a good first step is to become familiar with Eclipse SWT—the Standard Widget Toolkit, and work my way up from there.

Since I use Maven, I had to struggle a bit finding out how to configure my Maven project properly so that it’ll build an SWT app that’ll run both under Eclipse and from the terminal.

A little Googling brought me to Brice Lambi’s post on Maven SWT builds, but that was a little outdated.

In particular (and only after careful reading), the guide to Deploying SWT apps on Mac OS X says that the -Djava.library.path=.. option is needed for Eclipse 3.2.2 and earlier. Apparently, starting with 3.4 all you need is your OS-specific JAR (see here).

Anyway, after much fiddling about, I was able to get it all working like so: