Update plugin for Eclipse 4.20 with Java 11

[difflaender]

We have forked the plugin and made a version that seems to be working fine with the current Eclipse 2021-06 (4.20). https://github.com/profschumanngmbh/gwt-eclipse-plugin/commit/a66b0a4e2c8529a73037dbae74a7819046c67412

However, there were a bunch of concessions we had to make, so I am not sure if it's suitable for an official pull request. But I wanted to at least discuss the possibility and the challenges:

• We threw out all the targets for older Eclipse versions, since the code would not be compatible with the old libraries anyway.
• We had to remove some dependencies to Eclipse JST and WST for plugins/com.gwtplugins.gwt.eclipse.wtp.test and plugins/com.gwtplugins.gwt.eclipse.wtp.maven.test, since those were no longer present in recent repositories. Corresponding unit tests from those projects seem to have been disabled anyway.
• According to Brandon's pull request for Eclipse Photon, the built-in Jetty has some issues with Java 11. We don't use the built-in Jetty but instead start Jetty via a normal Java Launcher in Eclipse that uses Java 8, so this issue does not affect us. But this might be a showstopper for others.

Another thing to note: the SDBG Chrome JS Debugger does not seem to run properly with Java 11 due to the missing JAXB dependencies. This prevents debugging in SuperDevMode within Eclipse itself (though debugging via the browser's own debugger with source mapping is reportedly still possible). They already committed a fix to master some time ago, but the plugin's update repository does not seem to get updated. A third party team in https://github.com/sdbg/sdbg/issues/161 mentioned their own repo from which the latest master version can be pulled, though. Alternatively, we can build it from source ourselves.

[foosoftsrlold]

hi @difflaender, We tried to make more or less the same job you did, probably with much less experience. And yes... it appears it works (tried on Eclipse 2021-12)

Is your plugin version published somewhere?

If no one picked up your "request for PR" in 8 months, may be a project fork (I mean... not github fork) might make sense. And possibly... a new plugin published on Eclipse Marketplace.

What do you think?

[difflaender]

No, it's not published anywhere. We run our own preconfigured Eclipse distribution at work, so whenever it's time to update the distribution (on average every 9 months/3 Eclipse versions), I update the plugin's source to show no compile errors against the latest Eclipse dependencies and then deploy it via Maven Install to a local target, which I can then reference as download source in Eclipse to get it properly installed.

I don't really have any experience developing Eclipse plugins or working with the entire ecosystem either (as showcases by the fact that I simply disabled broken unit tests instead of fixing them), and we definitely don't have the capacity to officially maintain the plugin in the Marketplace or to keep up with Eclipse's frequent 3-monthly update cycle.

[foosoftsrlold]

Hi @difflaender, My situation is not very different from yours, but maintenance without any sort of improvement does not really look that heavy. i mean... from Photon to 2021-12, 3 years, the required patches are not so much. Let's see what the owner of this project thinks.... I'm quite surprised he's ignoring a PR proposal. Can publishing to the market place be really that complicate???

[skarzhevskyy]

The last published version of this plugin works for my team in Eclipse version 2021-09 (4.21.0) So we simply stopped upgrading Eclipse for now.

In our team we use separate launchers for Jetty for Old Dev Mode (yes with FF26) and Run it on Java 8. Also use Super Dev mode on Java 8.

My view is that current build and distribution of plugin is bound to personal credentials of Googles. So It can not be maintained by community from outside. You can't simply fork publish our own version that works for our teams and may be reused by others.

My understanding that If we are to work on the Fork of the project and make it compile and work some how we don't need to publish to market place as first task. Making distributions site on GitHub or GitLab and add a link to it on the project page maybe a good way to start. This may require days of physical time to setup GitHub Actions if you know what you are doing.

There good examples "LorenzoBettini/p2composite-github-pages-example" it maybe a good way to start on above.

I can promise to make POC of build before Summer.

[niloc132]

I believe this is now resolved, as part of the changes made in #428?

[difflaender]

Yeah, we were able to port the new changes to our fork and build it with Java 17 support. So I am closing the issue.