Purpose and benefits of Athena Common Build for Eclipse plugin project

What would be the purpose and/or benefits of implementing an Athena build for a private Eclipse plugin project? (using a private Hudson setup)

It seems like no search results ever answer this question, and I would really like to开发者_如何学编程 know.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Athena common build [1] is a very nice wrapper around the PDE Build mechanism. So if you want to use PDEBuild, then you can use Athena to help take away much of the "pain" that has come to be associated with using PDEBuild. I have personally used Athena common build for building my eclipse plugins and single feature into an update-site. You can see my releng project that contains the Athena common build here [2].

However, I have recently switched from Athena common build over to the Tycho project [3]. I found that Athena was too slow (inherited slowness from PDEBuild) and also was not being actively maintained. Tycho is very active and also moving to support all manner of eclipse plugin/feature/product related builds. I suspect it will be the new "defacto" standard within a few years. Personally I needed to move to Tycho because of its good support for building Eclipse products as well as feature/plugin update-sites. I never personally tried to build Eclipse products with Athena so I can't comment on its capabilities.

Another thing that I found helpful with Tycho is that it works well on windows, where as I never got Athena build to work on windows.

As far as Hudson integration I think it can easily build maven based projects (which Tycho is one) easily. If you are interested in converting your Eclipse plugins to use Tycho there is a "Athena-build-like" project called Minerva [4] that is a boiler plate project for how to setup a tycho build.

[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Common_Build_Infrastructure

[2] http://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/tools/trunk/ide/eclipse/releng/com.liferay.ide.eclipse.releng/
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[3] http://www.eclipse.org/tycho/

[4] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Minerva

Hope this helps.