How to deliver an ECLiPSe application

This question is probably of general interest.

> This other one might be an FAQ, but I did not find it in the FAQ:
> is there a way of creating standalone binary executables of some sort
> from eclipse programs?

The concept of "standalone executable" doesn't really exist anymore these days.
Almost every application now needs to be installed in some way, because of the
dependencies on other resources, in particular shared libraries. So the answer
is no, we don't try to do "standalone executables" with Eclipse anymore either.

The way to deploy an Eclipse application is to provide 3 components:

1. the Eclipse runtime package (see below)
2. the Eclipse code of your application, either in source form
    or in precompiled .eco format (see library(fcompile))
3. the "host" program, which nowadays is often a Java program that
    calls Eclipse as a library, but in the simplest case it can just
    be a one-line shell script which invokes eclipse and tells it to
    load and run your application code, e.g.
	/.../eclipse -b my_application.eco -e my_top_goal


The ECLiPSe runtime subset is contained in the package eclipse_rt.tgz,
which is part of the ECLiPSe distribution. This is a subset of the usual
ECLiPSe development package eclipse_basic.tgz, and does not contain:

     * the tkeclipse development environment
     * development-related libraries (asm, document, daVinci, fcompile,
         pretty_printer, profile, remote_tools, toplevel, tracer etc)
     * various compatibility libraries

This means that you cannot get an "Eclipse prompt" with this subset.
It can only be used

     * together with a Java, C or C++ host program which loads the eclipse-library
     * using the eclipse (or eclipse.exe) standalone executable with a
           -e <goal> command line option

Installing the runtime subset:

    1. Unpack eclipse_rt.tgz
    2. If your application uses lib(eplex), unpack one of the if_xxx interfaces
    3. If eclipse is used in embedded form, no further installation should
       be needed. Otherwise some registry entries and/or environment variables
       may need to be set, see README and Embedding Manual.


-- 
  Joachim Schimpf              /             phone: +44 20 7594 8187
  IC-Parc                     /      mailto:J.Schimpf@imperial.ac.uk
  Imperial College London    /    http://www.icparc.ic.ac.uk/eclipse