Tycho is a set of Maven plugins and extensions for building Eclipse plugins and OSGI bundles with Maven. Eclipse plugins and OSGI bundles have their own metadata for expressing dependencies, source folder locations, etc. that are normally found in a Maven POM. Tycho uses native metadata for Eclipse plugins and OSGi bundles and uses the POM to configure and drive the build. Tycho supports bundles, fragments, features, update site projects and RCP applications. Tycho also knows how to run JUnit test plugins using OSGi runtime and there is also support for sharing build results using Maven artifact repositories.
Tycho plugins introduce new packaging types and the corresponding lifecycle bindings that allow Maven to use OSGi and Eclipse metadata during a Maven build. OSGi rules are used to resolve project dependencies and package visibility restrictions are honored by the OSGi-aware JDT-based compiler plugin. Tycho will use OSGi metadata and OSGi rules to calculate project dependencies dynamically and injects them into the Maven project model at build time. Tycho supports all attributes supported by the Eclipse OSGi resolver (Require-Bundle, Import-Package, Eclipse-GenericRequire, etc). Tycho will use proper classpath access rules during compilation. Tycho supports all project types supported by PDE and will use PDE/JDT project metadata where possible. One important design goal in Tycho is to make sure there is no duplication of metadata between POM and OSGi metadata.