Building Applications Outside of Eclipse

The .cobolBuild and .pliBuild project files are built using Apache Ant. You can use external build scripts such as makefiles, shell scripts and others with an Ant build script to build one or more projects outside of Eclipse.

The benefits of this are:

It helps avoids building in Eclipse and any memory restrictions that might arise from the fact that you are building a very large code base.
If the scripts already exists, it means less configuration work to set the builds up.

Build using scripts

When using scripts to build a project outside of Eclipse, Micro Focus recommends that you disable its builder in Eclipse so that the IDE does not build it. To do this:

In Eclipse, right-click the project that you do not want to build inside the IDE.
Click Properties > Builders, and uncheck Micro Focus Project Builder.

If you do not disable the builder, there might be situations in which both Eclipse and the external scripts build the same project. If you refresh the project inside Eclipse, it will pick up the build output files that were changed outside of the IDE. Since the files are different, IDE then triggers a rebuild of the project which can cause a slowdown. To avoid this you can configure the external build scripts to produce the build output in a different location from the project's output directory.

Build in parallel or incrementally

You can compile your source code faster on multi-CPU machines if you use parallel compilation. You can also build JVM COBOL applications incrementally. See To Build a Project Using Apache Ant.