Continuous integration & eclipse plugin development

Question

I am developing a set of eclipse plugins, and I have several JUnit plugin tests that actually start another instance of eclipse, create a mock workspace and a mock project and runs various operations on them. I want to put that on continuous integration and I am at loss as to where to start. I am using Hudson, would there be any plugins that makes that easier? Can those tests launch eclipse in headless mode or something on the CI server? Pointers would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think the best solution for building Eclipse-based software currently is Tycho - it is based on Maven and uses your standard Eclipse files (like manifest, target platform, product definition). I got started with it using an intro from this blog: http://mattiasholmqvist.se/2010/02/building-with-tycho-part-1-osgi-bundles/, and it worked really well. We also use Hudson, and since Tycho is Maven-based, Hudson integration was trivial and worked simply by calling Maven, which Hudson supports out of the box.

Answer 2

As far as I know, Buckminster tries to solve these problems: you can create descriptors, and then Buckminster can execute your tasks.

For Hudson there is a Buckminster module, that helps executing the Buckminster builds.