Deeclipsification
A while ago I posted that I was going to try to de-eclipsify my software. That involves removing the reliance on fundamental Eclipse facilities - for example, the standard Eclipse classes for paths or memory addresses, or plugin loading - so that the code can be used with standard Java, and no Eclipse present.
I’m doing this partly because I may wish to produce tools which do not depend on Eclipse, but mostly because there are areas for which I don’t currently have a test suite because of these Eclipse dependencies. It will be much easier to test many bits without having Eclipse in the mix.
On the way, though, I experimented with producing standalone Eclipse applications (called RCP - Rich Client Platform - applications). It was very easy, and the resulting application can be used as a standalone GUI application or from the command-line. I could, therefore, have retained my Eclipse dependence if I’d produced everything this way. Unfortunately, though, even the tiniest RCP application seems to weigh in at many megabytes so this didn’t seem the right thing to do for simple command-line tools.
Having said that, I’m still planning on producing tools which use Eclipse’s Draw2D API for graphics - which can then be exported to PDF and/or SVG. So, it’s a bit odd, but I might be producing command-line Eclipse applications which utilise these Eclipse drawing APIs to create graphics.