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.