Chapter 14 Working with the PowerDesigner Plugin for Eclipse

Generating an Eclipse Project

Eclipse is a platform that allows third parties to add plugins to provide new features and extend the platform. For example, a plugin could provide IDE features, modeling features, code generator, and so on.

There are two Eclipse plugins that may be used by PowerDesigner customers:

JDT (Java Development Tool) is an IDE that allows users to develop Java applications, edit Java code, browse Java classes and compile Java code. Users can define other build commands
EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) is a modeling framework and code generation facility for building tools and other applications based on a structured object model. From the definition of a model called Ecore model, it can generate all the necessary Java code for metadata management, navigation between classes, serialization/deserialization in XML format, Eclipse browser plugin for creating and modifying instance data

Java development

PowerDesigner and Eclipse enable round-trip engineering for Java development:

Perform high level analysis and design using PowerDesigner
Design and create Java components in PowerDesigner
Generate Java code and Eclipse project files
Open the project in Eclipse
Finish the implementation of Java classes using Eclipse
Compile, package, deploy and debug using Eclipse
Reverse engineer the final Java code to synchronize the PowerDesigner model

Eclipse project generation

An Eclipse project is stored in a directory. The name of the project is the name of the directory. A project is defined by:

A .project file that defines the name of the project and the build commands
A .classpath file that defines the source directory, the binary directory and the list of libraries
Source files and other files

By default, a Java project only supports the build command for compilation. Additional commands must be defined with command lines or Ant tasks, which is not always easy to do. Users may also need to add additional libraries to compile Java files.

PowerDesigner can generate the following files:

.project
.classpath
build.xml for Ant build script

Depending on the type of Java classes contained in a model, PowerDesigner can also add the necessary build tasks and libraries to prevent the users from doing it manually.

With the generated Eclipse Project files, users can immediately:

Compile Java classes
Package Java classes to create .JAR, .WAR or .EAR files
Generate Javadoc
Run J2EE verifier
Deploy the .JAR, .WAR or .EAR file into Sybase EAServer, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Tomcat

To generate an Eclipse project, you have to create an OOM with the correct profile and define generation options.