Eclipse's PDE does a great job of allowing plugins to be developed and tested inside the development environment. It can also be used to export deployable plugins and create update sites to allow remote Eclipse clients to download updates. Automating this build process is highly desirable; builds can take place continuously and testing/documentation reports generated. Indeed, automated builds are a part of the Eclipse development process, and it is possible to launch an Eclipse build via a headless Eclipse installation. This tutorial will look at three different ways of creating automated builds of a set of plugins, giving the advantages and disadvantages of each: o Using the PDE automated build/fetch scripts (advantage: relatively easy; disadvantage: can be difficult to customise, doesn't work outside of CVS, doesn't generate update sites) o Using Ant files (advantage: can do what you want; disadvantage: not particularly easy hooks or dependency calculations -- in Ant 1, anyway) o Using Maven to build as a set of projects (advantage: handles dependencies, can generate documentation as well as code; disadvantages: doesn't work well with OSGI manfifests, and takes longer to set up) At the end of this tutorial, attendees should know how to choose between the appropriate build processes and will have a template from which they can work from.