We have faced the problem of building our application on our continuous integration server. It was a pain to write separate ant build scripts, because all information is already present in the eclipse environment, so nobody is interested in synchronizing hundreds of eclipse projects build path settings to build scripts. Usually builds will start with checking out the project folders from source code management system into a "to be workspace" root folder. What you can use headlesseclipse for after checkout (the arguments of the program one by one): - import - creates an Eclipse workspace from the root folder, and imports all of the subfolders as Eclipse projects - clean - calls the clean build on every project. It is often useful, if we reuse the workspace - build - Builds all projects using incremental building. After a clean, or for the first time, a full build will be run. It runs Ant builders correctly. The console of the Ant builders are also dumped to system out - exportwars - This will export all dynamic web projects to a war file in the workspace root directory as .war. They are ready to deploy! These are the main features currently. We plan to implement server creation, publish, export jars and ears, running unit tests. Would You contribute? Report issues, develop new features with us! What else would You welcome in headless Eclipse? Links: Project homepage User manual Some information about internal working Download it, and put it into plugins folder of Your Eclipse for Java EE Developers version 3.4 or 3.5

Really nice of you guys to create an own project, but I thing it would much better to contribute to the P2 project, then inventing the wheel again.

I googled p2, and I find, that p2 is mainly for eclipse plugins and RCP applications (OSGI bundles). Truly saying this area is not so familiar for me. I know the concepts, I want to move on to use newer technologies like them, but I have to stick my company and customers. Anyway this plugin can be good choice if You want to build JEE applications, web modules, or simple java applications in headless mode. On the other hand, if I dont understand you correctly, and P2 is good for such work, handles pretty normal dynamic web module projects with custom ant builders and so on, just let me know how to use it, and we will use, and maybe we can contribute as well in P2.

May be very useful tool! Please, can you tell if headlesseclipse support building workspaces with eclipse plugins / OSGi bundles using PDE builder and tasks?

Currently eclipse plugins are not supported in trivial way. As far as I know for eclipse plugins when you export your plugin, you can say in options tab to "save as ant script". This way if you save your export process, then you can add the saved script to your project as an ant builder in the last place (to have java files compiled), then our plugin will call it. For more information about ant builders, see http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t65486.html .

A new version of this plugin is released, which can export plugins and features now. If you have any new feature this plugin can do, please post an issue on the plugins home page. -- Vazul

2 years ago I wrote a similar tool: http://eclipseassembly.sourceforge.net/ It is no longer maintained or supported. Similar to what is proposed by "headlesseclipse", it does not need complex ant scripts to build applications.