How to build projects outside of Eclipse GUI

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How to build projects outside of Eclipse GUI

With the introduction of WebLogic Portal 10.3.2, the product moved to the new Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse http://www.oracle.com/tools/enterprise-eclipse-pack.html from the BEA Workshop for WebLogic product for Eclipse. As part of this transition, the ant export facilities provided with Workshop for WebLogic to allow a project to be built outside of the Eclipse GUI as part of an automated procedure are no longer provided as there are several more standard options to do this type of build automation. This post covers these new options, and specifically calls out one way you can do a very similar process on a Solaris based environment

The Issue

Eclipse projects contain a lot of information about dependencies. Such information is necessary to compile the projects. However, customers need to compile the projects outside of development environments – staging, production, and continuous build environments. The set of all possible project types and dependencies is very large, and some customers track these dependencies outside of Eclipse as part of their process, and integrate these into their custom build processes. This is in fact the recommended best practice, and is often done by leveraging solutions such as Maven. However, many customers rely on Eclipse and their developers to store these dependencies, especially those that were formerly leveraging the export ant facility of Workshop for WebLogic. Workshop for WebLogic provided a mechanism to export ant scripts, which can be used without an IDE, to build Eclipse Projects. However, this solution was fragile as it relied on constantly changing Eclipse internals. WLP 10.3.2 made a strategic shift to OEPE from Workshop for WebLogic, and OEPE does not provide this export ant facility. Rather, it relies on other, more standard approaches.

Sample Headless Build Instructions (including Solaris)

Doing basic headless builds using Eclipse is a fairly straightforward process. One of the most common projects for doing headless builds can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/headlesseclipse
However, to do the build on an atypical platform for running Eclipse, such as Solaris, is a bit more effort initially to setup- so we are providing sample instructions below on how you can do headless builds. They may need to be updated and modified to meet each customers particular build requirements.
Unzip that on the Solaris machine.
Get WTP 3.1.0 -- http://archive.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R3.1/R-3.1-20090616035105/ is the download page.
A direct link is:http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/webtools/downloads/drops/R3.1/R-3.1-20090616035105/wtp-R-3.1-20090616035105.zip
Unzip WTP 3.1.0 to a /dropins/wtp folder; it should then have dropins/wtp/eclipse/features and dropins/wtp/eclipse/plugins folders.
On WLP installation on Windows or Linux, zip up the following directories:
/oepe_11gR1PS1/eclipse/dropins
dtp
emf
emf-xsd
gef
wtp
oepe
Copy archive from step 5 onto Solaris host
Unzip archive from step 6 into /dropins. Note that the wtp subdirectory will already exist. This will add/change some contents.
On WLP installation on Windows or Linux, zip up the following directory: /wlportal_10.3/eclipse
Copy archive from step 8 onto Solaris host
Unzip the archive from step 9 into /wlportal_10.3/eclipse (creating the ecplipse directory)
In a /links folder, create a com.bea.wlp.link file that looks like:
path=
Edit the /eclipse.ini to add:
-Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true
-Dweblogic.home=
Download the headlessworkspace plugin from http://code.google.com/p/headlesseclipse/downloads/list and drop it into /plugins
Start Eclipse with -clean parameter
Validate that the portal plugins can be seen (eg. Create Portal EAR project)

To run the headless build, from execute something like:
./eclipse –nosplash –data -application com.ind.eclipse.headlessworkspace.Application clean build exportears
See the documentation at the http://code.google.com/p/headlesseclipse/wiki/Documentation for information on running the headlesseclipse project.
You should be able to execute the headless build on Solaris both through VNC (no need to run the Xserver) and through telnet (after running the Xserver as documented).