Creating a Daemon-style Eclipse "headless" Application

A daemon application is an application that does not exit immediately and does not wait for any input/interaction from the user. Instead, it is (usually) providing a network service or by being a server. Apache Tomcat servlet container is one such daemon.

To run  a daemon-style application in Eclipse runtime, it is tempting to just use the standard infinite loop:

import org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplication;
...

public class Application implements IApplication {

@Override
public Object start(IApplicationContext context) throws Exception {
// ... start services here (in another thread) ...
while (true) {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
break;
}
}
return IApplication.EXIT_OK;
}

While this technique works, I believe the better way is just to immediately return normally. And use Eclipse's -noExit launch argument to let Eclipse know that we're still doing things in the background.

So the start() method can be just like this:

@Override
public Object start(IApplicationContext context) throws Exception {
final ResourceSetImpl resourceSet = new ResourceSetImpl();
Resource dealerResource = resourceSet
.createResource(URI
.createFileURI("/home/ceefour/project/AbisPulsa/workspace/com.abispulsa.model/src/model/YahooDealer.xmi"));
dealerResource.load(null);
dealer = (YahooDealerImpl) dealerResource.getContents().get(0);

dealer.signon();

Resource catalogRes = resourceSet.createResource(URI.createFileURI("/home/ceefour/project/AbisPulsa/workspace/com.abispulsa.model/src/model/Catalog.xmi"));
catalogRes.load(null);
Catalog catalog = (Catalog) catalogRes.getContents().get(0);
dealer.setCatalog(catalog);

return IApplication.EXIT_OK;
}

Then edit the application's Launch Configuration and add the following to program arguments:

-noExit -consoleLog

You may also want to add the OSGi console (argument -console):

-noExit -consoleLog -console

Let's run 'em servers. :-)