Monday, July 10, 2006

France 7 - Italy 0

Italy can have all the word cup they want, but they still don't have a committer in the SDK whereas France is strongly represented with 7 active people and 4 retirees :-)
Congrats for the cup Italy.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Setting the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment

In 3.2, each bundle included in the Eclipse SDK got its "required execution environments" set.
The two main motivations were:
  • Carefully controlling the set of APIs we use from the JRE and reduce our dependencies
  • Express in an API way the fact that some bundles could run on lower configurations than the one recommended by the platform (for example SWT and OSGi can run on foundation)
By doing that we also got some added benefits:
  • At runtime, bundles that do not qualify to run on the VM will not run (for example bundles requiring java 5 will not resolve on a 1.4 VM)
  • At build time, PDE Build will set the compilation flags for you and make use of the proper class library (see PDE Build help).
So if you write your bundle using java 5 feature, want to manage your JRE dependencies or simply want to do it the platform way, set the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment in your manifest.mf. Check out the wiki for the details.