In one of my pre­vi­ous posts I talked about how to build Scala pro­jects with PDE Build. However, PDE Build is rather old and has long been su­per­seded by Buck­min­ster. The great ad­vant­age of Buck­min­ster is that it is ac­tu­ally a light­weight Ec­lipse SDK with all that you need to build an RCP ap­plic­a­tion: a work­space of pro­jects, a tar­get plat­form, and so on. To build Scala pro­jects in Ec­lipse you will most likely in­stall the Scala IDE. Un­for­tu­nately, this plug-in can­not be in­stalled in Buck­min­ster right away. But there is a work­around…

Re­cently, JSON has be­come an ex­cel­lent al­tern­at­ive to XML. But most JSON pars­ers writ­ten in Java are still rather slow. On my search for faster lib­rar­ies I found two things: BSON and Jack­son.

Some time ago I wrote about how to let Ec­lipse PDE Build auto­mat­ic­ally com­pile Scala pro­jects. There­fore a spe­cial Ant script (customBuildCallbacks.xml) had to be cre­ated in the pro­ject’s root dir­ect­ory. This script looked for the Scala lib­rary and com­piler and then built the pro­ject’s source files.

I’m us­ing Git as the ver­sion con­trol sys­tem for my pro­jects for some time now. Since the graph­ical user in­ter­faces are not very ma­ture yet and I like hav­ing full con­trol over everything, I’m us­ing Git on the com­mand line (i.e. Bash). In or­der to avoid en­ter­ing the same com­mands all over again, I wrote some Bash ali­ases and func­tions which ease the use of Git.

Lift already provides some mech­an­isms to pub­lish a web­site in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. If Lift is used within an OSGi en­vir­on­ment, a little work­around is needed in or­der to make it find the Re­source Bundles con­tain­ing lan­guage-de­pend­ent strings (usu­ally provided as prop­erty files).

PDE Build is the stand­ard build tool from Ec­lipse. It is used to ex­port OSGi bundles, plu­gins, fea­tures or products. Run­ning in head­less mode, PDE Build can be used for auto­matic builds without a GUI. The Scala IDE does not sup­port PDE Build yet. In or­der to com­pile Scala pro­jects you have to do some manual work.