Eclipse and SciJava annotation processing

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Steffi,

since you mentioned it yesterday, and since we are collaborating on
SciJava projects, I thought about writing up a brief description of the
problems Eclipse has with annotation processing (which is used heavily by
SciJava), along with two suggestions how to address them.

For background, let be briefly introduce the concept of annotation
processing. Developed in the context of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB),
annotations allow developers to provide meta information for use with
types (e.g. classes), fields and methods. The idea was to let so-called
annotation processors parse those annotations and then generate code
*during the compilation*. For example, a specific annotation processor
could generate getters and setters for all appropriately annotated fields.

Now, why does Eclipse have problems with that? The specification of Java5
demands that all annotation processors on the class path are called *as
part of the compilation*. Unfortunately, the interfaces annotation
processors have to implement are tuned toward complete compilation, but
Eclipse wants to build *incrementally*. Therefore, the Eclipse developers
decided to punt and require special settings by the developers to force
running specific annotation processors.

To work around this problem, we have code in a class called EclipseHelper
designed to detect when Eclipse-compiled code is in dear need of
processing the annotations. The idea being that as a diligent developer,
you always will run at least one unit test, or at least one interactive
test, before shipping your build artifact, and the EclipseHelper would be
triggered by the first code path accessing SciJava plugins. You always
test your code in Eclipse before packaging and distributing it, right? ;-)

Now, with Christian Dietz, I developed a pure Eclipse (non-Maven) example
that makes sure that the annotations are processed -- even if you never
test the code from within Eclipse -- and you can find the code here:

https://github.com/scijava/eclipse-scijava-project

The README contains a brief description of the problem, too, and a link to
the relevant commit adding the workaround.

But as you pointed out that you appreciated the patience with which I
helped you get into Maven (and subsequently benefit from everything that
system provides for you), I guess it is time to make another, Maven-based,
example, intended to be imported into Eclipse via Import>Maven>Import
Existing Maven Project.

The main idea here is to use a *profile*. A Maven profile is essentially a
*conditional* part of the pom.xml. It looks roughly like this:

<profiles>
<profile>
<id>total-eclipse-of-my-heart</id>

...
</profile>
</profiles>

The part that is inside the <profile> block could be a <build> block,
indented two levels more than usual. The profiles are conditional, and you
can make them conditional upon some tell-tale such as the m2e property set
by Eclipse's Maven integration. See a real-life example here:

https://github.com/scijava/scijava-common/blob/e53204823068a4313c618c362851a64b16a199b8/pom.xml#L200-L241

(This is actually the real life example that lets you build SciJava
common inside Eclipse, with all SciJava annotations properly processed.)

I guess the best course of action would be to include this profile in
pom-scijava, but we will have to make it conditional, somehow, on
scijava-common being a dependency, otherwise we would fail builds of
SciJava-related projects that do *not* have scijava-common as dependency
(such as ImgLib2 core).

Hopefully this clarifies the problem and the possible solutions,
Johannes