Eclipse Plug-In Contribution

[Jens v.P.]

Hi all,

maybe some of you know of or are already using the LWJGL-plugin I created for Eclipse. I have mainly developed that plugin for my GEF3D project. GEF3D has now become an Eclipse project (http://www.eclipse.org/gef3d). So I'm going to move all GEF3D related stuff from my personal homepage at the university where I'm working (http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/se/personen/pilgrim/gef3d/index.html) to Eclipse. Unfortunately, LWJGL cannot be added as a 3rd party library to Eclipse due to legal issues.

So I would like to contribute my LWJGL-plugin stuff to the LWJGL project directly, making it easier for users to access LWJGL from within Eclipse. The current version only wraps the existing LWJGL files and makes it easy to use LWJGL from other Eclipse plugins:

• LWJGL libraries (jars and native liberaries) are bundled as a plugin and can used by other plugins
• LWJGL sources and javadoc is automatically linked within Eclipse, i.e. if you are writing an Eclipse plugin and specify LWJGL as a required plugin, source and javadoc is available via hotkeys
• an LWJGL-Testview is included to indicate that the plugin has been installed correctly

There are some things missing if you want to develop non-Eclipse applications, such as

• Run As... feature for running LWJGL standalone applications without struggling with the library path
• Export As... feature for packaging an LWJGL application as Java Webstart or other application

I could attach the source code of the current plugins and the build script to this thread (if this is a way of contributing to LWJGL). I'm posting this message in order to get some feedback if you would like to have such a plugin, and if there are maybe people who'd like to contribute to this plugin, too (e.g. by writing missing features).

Actually there is not one plugin, but severals. Here is a technical list explaining the existing plugins:

• org.lwjgl -- main plugin with binaries and jars, there is only one plugin with the native code for all platforms, this may be split up (but it is maybe easier to  simply provide one plugin for all). This plugin is the only one required by clients
• org.lwjgl.doc -- javadoc
• org.lwjgl.source -- sources
• org.lwjgl.test -- Test view (could be renamed to testview)

Cheers,

Jens