e4 on JavaFX with the bnd-maven-plugin (with VS Code)

Just a few minutes ago I blogged about our future plans for e(fx)clipse and to show you that we take the things mentionned there really serious I can provide you an initial report on the first 2 points from the the list:

Freedom of development style
Freedom of development tool

Since its inception the way to develop "e4 on JavaFX" meant:

useage Eclipse PDE inside your Eclipse IDE
useage Maven-Tycho as the headless build system

We will start to change that and in the weeks to come!

First and most important

We won't take away ANYTHING - if you want to use PDE and Tycho please do so - we are going to support that development style like did in the past!

The future is pure maven/gradle

I've played around a lot in the past weeks with Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Netbeans and VS Code to find what would work out best and I think I've reached a point where I can provide you some screenshots and screen casts.

Eclipse

In Eclipse all I need to develop my application is the m2e extension. screen-maven-pure-eclipse

VS Code

To give me the extra kick I decided to give VS-Code and the Java-Extension from RedHat a shot. Watch on YouTube

The technology

Now that you have looked at the cool screen-cast let's talk about the boring technology in the backend. We rely on 2 things:

That we publish the complete e(fx)clipse platform in a Maven-Repository
The excellent biz.aQute.bnd/bnd-maven-plugin part of the bnd-toolsuite