After trying it a couple of times, I have found a way to run kettle plugin in Eclipse without loading all the sources. Here are steps:
- Add the kettle-engine.jar, kettle-core.jar, kettle-ui.jar and kettle-db.jar in the build path
- Copy the plugin folder under Kettle installation into the Eclipse project.
- Create the corresponding plugin folder for your custom plug in and create plugin.xml
- Open the Run Configurations window
- Create a new Java Application
- Put the project name in project field and "org.pentaho.di.ui.spoon.Spoon" into the main class (Alternatively, you can search this class by clicking on "Search".
- In the classpath tab, add all the jar files in the data-integration/libext, data-integration/libext/jfree, data-integration/libext/pentaho, data-integration/libext/spring, data-integration/libext/common, data-integration/libswt, data-integration/libswt/win32 (if linux, data-integration/libswt/linux) folders in kettle installation to "user entries"
- In the same tab, click on advanced, select "Add External Folder". Select the installation folder (data-integration) and add to the user entries.
- Now you can run the application and should be able to see the Spoon running in Eclipse