How to import a jar in Eclipse

Question

How do I import a jar in Eclipse?

Answer 1

Just a comment on importing jars into Eclipse (plug-in development) projects:

In case you are developing Eclipse plug-ins, it makes sense to use Eclipse's native bundling mechanism instead of just importing the jar into a plug-in project. Eclipse (or better its underlying OSGi runtime, Equinox) uses so-called bundles which contain some more information than plain jars (e.g., version infos, dependencies to other bundles, exported packages; see the MANIFEST.MF file). Because of this information, OSGi bundles can be dynamically loaded/unloaded and there is automatic dependency resolution available in an OSGi/Eclipse runtime. Hence, using OSGi bundles instead of plain jars (contained inside another OSGi bundle) has some advantages.

(BTW: Eclipse plug-ins are the same thing as OSGi bundles.)

There is a good chance that somebody already bundled a certain (3rd party) library as an OSGi bundle. You might want to take a look at the following bundle repositories:

• http://www.springsource.com/repository/app/
• http://download.eclipse.org/tools/orbit/downloads/
• http://www.osgi.org/Repository/HomePage