JDT without Eclipse?

Question

Some time ago I wrote an Eclipse plugin which makes use of JDT to do some parsing. Now I am thinking of making a command-line version of this app. Naturally, I hope to reuse the parsing code, so I need to get JDT to work outside Eclipse. Is there any way I can accomplish this (maybe build some wrappers, etc)? Are there any ports of the JDT library that provide the same API / functionality but work independently of Eclipse?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Providenciaprovident

I am parsing source code to get its structure (Abstract Syntax Tree). This link shows precisely what I am talking about (vogella.de/articles/EclipseJDT/article.html). Something like Antlr, etc, except that I already wrote the code with JDT, and I want to reuse it instead of rewriting with Antlr. Sorry I think I didnt make it clear – Providenciaprovident

hi @alexloh, did you get a solution for this? it would be great if you can explain how you accomplished this with some extra information? – Snath

Answer 1

The JDT is divided into two distinct parts. The parsing parts should all be in plugins which have no UI-dependencies at all. I think they do have a dependency on the Eclipse runtime, which means that you more or less need to create a "headless RCP application".

Consonance

Hmm I can't give "Accepted answer" to both :( Both this post and the one below are useful, and searching for "headless RCP application" put me on what seems to be the right track. Thanks! – Providenciaprovident

Answer 2

You can use JDT Core in the command line. Parsing, AST, rewriting everything can be done without the UI.

There

You need to dig into the docs and classes to find out the right calls. Eg: help.eclipse.org/kepler/… – There

Answer 3

In order to be able to use AST classes in a stand alone application you have to use such libraries (where xx stands for version):

org.eclipse.core.contenttype_xx.jar
org.eclipse.core.jobs_xx.jar
org.eclipse.core.resources_xx.jar
org.eclipse.core.runtime_xx.jar
org.eclipse.equinox.common_xx.jar
org.eclipse.equinox.preferences_xx.jar
org.eclipse.jdt.core_xx.jar
org.eclipse.osgi_xx.jar

If you installed eclipse with JDT all those jars are in eclipse's plugin folder for example in Windows it could be in C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\

Sidecar