We use Eclipse as the IDE for developing all sorts of Java/J2EE applications in our 150 people odd IT department. One of the common problems we have been seeing is that developers download and install different versions of Eclipse and plugins based on their personal likes and dislikes.
We have been trying to bring some consistency to this and have standardized on the version and the plugins that developers should be using. So the problem now is how do we distribute this installation to the team. We have zipped the directories and shared it through a shared drive. But I am looking for a better solution using some kind of provisioning tool for Eclipse using which people can install the IDE or get updates.
Has anyone faced this problem? What are your solutions to this? How do you ensure a standard Eclipse environment across developers?
I found Yoxos as a potential solution to this. Does anyone have any experience with it? Can p2 be used to do this?
You can create your own composite p2 repository and use p2 installer to bootstrap Eclipse from there. Alternatively you could use one of the commercial tools, such as Yoxos, Pulse or Nexus.
Our solution is currently a non-freware one, based on Nexus Pro.
Since it supports p2 repositories as well as well as the ability to combine multiple Eclipse update sites into a single URL, we are using that last feature to propose one URL per project, each one referencing the right set of plugins for each project.
alt text http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9762/mavenp2.png
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What im trying to do is install JBOSS Tools onto Eclipse Keplar OFFLINE. The reason i'm trying to do an offline installation is that i'm working on a VM that does and cannot have internet access.
So first i must ask is this at all anyway possible?
I have downloaded the zips from the JBoss Tools download site and use the Eclipse archive installer but it always goes to "Cannot perform operation. Computing alternative solutions". What it looks like it's doing at this point is access online directories which it cannot do. I've tried doing this with just the Abridged JBoss Tools as that's the minimum requirements i need but it does the same thing.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
First you need Eclipse Kepler for Java EE Developers, then you need JBoss Tools 4.1.2.Final p2 repository for Eclipse Kepler, then just do it the same way as you did before and it should work this time.
i read in other post of stackoverflow when the comes the error:
Cannot perform operation. Computing alternative solutions.
Means that plugins that you have are conflicting with the ones attempted to be installed.Once it computes the alternate paths and next wizrd page is presented you should be able to see what the conflicts are. In this particular case it might be something related to MAven Profiles Management..
link referenced: Cannot perform operation. Computing alternate solutions, may take a while STS?
I want to find a way to quickly install eclipse with the same plugins and settings on several different Windows 7 computers. How could I go about doing this?
There are no easy solutions, but the process itself is clearly automateable. One solution would be the use of the p2 director application. You have to download a single director installation - one is available from the Buckminster download page, but from any Eclipse installation you can access this director application and use it to download all required software.
An alternative is the Oomph project, where you can define a model that describes what features do you want to install (among other things, such as default properties, source code to checkout), and it manages the download and installation automatically; and can also update the installation as well. One of my collegues like Oomph very much, but to tell the truth, my personal experience was that it was a bit raw (a few month ago).
For my organization, I'm trying to create a localized Eclipse update server that includes all of the plugins and configurations that my team typically needs. This will reduce the load on our limited external bandwidth being used to pull down plugin updates. A centralized mirror will allow the plugin to be retrieved once and then distributed to my team of developers.
This strategy is similar to how we use Sonatype's Nexus to mirror and proxy Maven artifacts & repositories for our team locally. I've noticed that Nexus professional product does provide this sort of Eclipse plugin proxy and aggregation, but for a fee of $900/year, that's a bit too steep of a cost just to solve our external bandwidth problem.
I'm hoping there is an open source alternative to these features in nexus pro that has already been discovered. Standing up and running my own update site is easy, but tracking down proper versions of each of our plugins is what i'd love to have help with.
Steps in the right direction?
I've found references to using the Eclipse Update Manager itself to accomplish this (described in this blog post http://www.denoo.info/2009/09/mirroring-eclipse-update-sites/), however that post is quite outdated and I'm unsure if it is still valid given Eclipse's changes to updates over the past 2 years. EPMT is also mentioned (http://www.developerfusion.com/project/25052/epmt/) but that project seems to have been dormant for years. If anyone has opinions on these methods, i'd be interested in them as well.
Thanks in advance.
I would like to settle on a tool to create/maintain my custom eclipse distrib (starting with next 3.6). By studying previous questions main contenders seem:
Pulse
Yoxos
Google Workspace Mechanic: recently announced
doing it yourself in eclipse
Has anyone experiences in several of them and can comment on advantages etc?? My wishes are:
by 'distrib' I mean: plugins, settings & preferences...
be able to use the same eclipse setup in several workstations
MAYBE sharing with other members of the team
works across 3.5 and next 3.6: I don't know if it's possible. And anyway I would not object to customize the distrib once per new eclipse major release
Basically I was looking for the similar plugin or product. Pulse and Yoxos both supports plugin sync and workspace preference sync which is what i was mostly expecting.
Pulse
Pros
Pulse Explorer let you create new profile easily and share it
Eclipse installation folder is configurable and can be used as standalone installation for each profile
Cons
I felt sharing workspace preferences is complicated
Plugins repo search is slow
Replaced default update / install menus with Yoxos update
Very very buggy
Yoxos
Pros
I felt importing workspace preferences and save it to your online profile is easy
Search the plugins from public repositories is cool and very easy
Single eclipse installation is shared between all profiles
Cons
Yoxos Customizer is very complex (at least in my experience)
Custom added repositories are not
synced with server
Workspace Mechanic
Its very cool, more flexible plugin, but will sync only workspace preferences across eclipse installations
Personally I'm settled with Yoxos now.
Also refer
http://www.poweredbypulse.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29
Same plugins: I would just create update site with my plugins, or composite update site pointing to update sites with plugins you're interested in. Or you can simply use Eclipse Marketplace, which can create such update site for you from plugins you mark as favorite. Yoxos and Pulse should also work fine.
Same settings / preferences: Workspace Mechanic from Google may do the job for you. Beware: it is new project, which was just released into public. Disclaimer: I have no real experience with it :-) Pulse Team Edition should also be able to help (see previous disclaimer though).
I was in search for something like that myself (but more driven by the shared team approach), and I highly recommend the new Yoxos 5 Beta. It features synchronization of plugins and settings, while all your other suggestions only synchronize either plugins or settings, if I remember correctly.
In addition to your list, it might also be interesting to have your own mirrored update site, so its easier to control which version of which plugin can be installed at all (that also being more important in a corporate environment). See Eclipse help for details on how to create that mirrored site.
I think Sonatype Maven Studio leverages Maven to include Eclipse provisioning.
I've just set up my machine from scratch and was wondering if there are any open available ready to use Eclipse versions (3.5 preferred) which have already installed famous (most used) plugins like subversion support, maven, pmd, checkstyle, findbugs etc. This would save me time setting it up myself.
thx,
kuku
Never really tried it myself, but this may ease it up for you: yoxos
And then there's myeclipseide but I think you pay for it.
For making sure everyone on our team works with the same set of plugins, we are using the notion of "group of plugins" in a Nexus Pro (so non-free) repository
Nexus Professional has support for Eclipse P2 repositories, and it can serve Eclipse plugin artifacts to tools that know how to interact with the Eclipse P2 repository format including Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede.
If you use the Eclipse IDE, you probably have a set of plugins which every single developer needs to install to get productive.
Using Nexus Professional, you can combine multiple Eclipse update sites into a single URL which your developers can use when they are configuring a development environment.
Using Nexus Professional as a single point-of-access between your developers and the Eclipse update sites they depend on allows you to manage and define a set of common Eclipse plugins in your organization's Eclipse development environment.