Griffon Eclipse Support Plugin

Keeping Eclipse classpaths in sync for Griffon apps — a fork from my Groovy days

A plugin for the Griffon framework (the Groovy-based desktop application framework) that keeps Eclipse project files up to date. This is my fork of griffon-legacy/griffon-eclipse-support-plugin, from my JVM/Groovy era in the early 2010s.

The concepts

Griffon apps manage their own dependencies through plugins and an application lib/ directory, which meant Eclipse’s .classpath file constantly drifted out of sync with reality. This plugin fixes that with a single script, eclipse-update, that regenerates the .classpath file — and it runs automatically whenever a plugin is installed or uninstalled, so the IDE stays honest without manual bookkeeping. If you add or remove a library from lib/ yourself, you run the script by hand.

How to use it

Setup is mostly on the Eclipse side: define USER_HOME and GRIFFON_HOME classpath variables in the IDE so the generated entries resolve. Source directories under griffon-app and src are configured automatically, and extra ones can be declared in BuildConfig.groovy:

eclipse.classpath.include = ['gen-src', '../app2/src']

This is a historical artifact now — Griffon has moved on and the upstream org is literally named “griffon-legacy” — but it’s a nice reminder that developer-tooling glue code, the unglamorous kind, is often what keeps a team productive.

Language: Groovy

Source code: github.com/avnit/griffon-eclipse-support-plugin Upstream: github.com/griffon-legacy/griffon-eclipse-support-plugin

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