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| <meta name="Author" content="Rodrigo Peretti"> | |
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| <title>Improved Ant Support</title> | |
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| <h2> | |
| Problem:</h2> | |
| The Ant classpath has to be extended in order to include | |
| user defined entries. A "classic" newbie problem is when the user tries | |
| to write a script to compile some Java code. Ant does not find javac on | |
| the class path (tools.jar is not available). | |
| <br> Currently, in order to workaround this problem the | |
| user has to contribute a fragment to org.eclipse.ant and include all the | |
| necessary jars in it. | |
| <h2> | |
| Proposed Solutions:</h2> | |
| <b>1) Create an extra class loader for org.eclipse.ant where extra entries | |
| would be added dynamically.</b> | |
| <br> The plugin class loader would not access those jars | |
| directly. It would have to ask this extra class loader for anything it | |
| wants. Extra entries would be added at runtime. | |
| <p><b>Problems</b> | |
| <br> Hard or impossible to be implemented with the current | |
| platform. | |
| <p><b>2) Create a fragment containing all user-defined extra libraries.</b> | |
| <br> Create a UI preference where the user adds/removes | |
| entries to extra jars/folders to be added to the org.eclipse.ant classpath. | |
| Behind the scenes the user changes are added to a fragment and next time | |
| the user starts eclipse, the changes take effect. | |
| <p><b>Problems</b> | |
| <ul> | |
| <li> | |
| The user has to restart Eclipse.</li> | |
| <li> | |
| The user might not have write permission to the runtime instalation of | |
| Eclipse.</li> | |
| <li> | |
| We cannot add absolute paths to library entries on fragments.</li> | |
| <li> | |
| = We cannot implement this solution</li> | |
| </ul> | |
| <b>3) Create a class loader composed by user-defined URLs and plugin class | |
| loaders from plug-ins that contribute tasks.</b> | |
| <br> Description here. | |
| <p><b>Problems</b> | |
| </body> | |
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