Target Platform Improvements, Top Eclipse Helios Feature #6
There are three large groups of artifacts that play a key role while writing software. There are the tools you use, the code you write and the libraries you depend on. There is a large body of research studying the cognitive support provided by software development tools. There is also a number of tool centric development models. Facilities like Yoxos and the Eclipse Market Place help you manage these tool chains.
Regarding source code management, there’s a endless debate over which tools, technologies and techniques we should use. In fact, most University curriculum’s spend a great deal of time on how to best architect, design, document, write and manage source code.
However, when it comes to the management of your 3rd party libraries — the code you need but you don’t write — this is very much an ad hoc process. Finding dependencies, including them on your build path, finding the corresponding source, determining (and locating) which version you need, etc… is mostly a manual process:
- Figure out what jar you need (Apache commons collections for example)
- Use google to search for the jar
- Add the jar to your path
- Look at the errors
- Did you have the right version
- Did you miss any dependencies
- Figure out what else you need to find
- GOTO 2
Lucky for us as Eclipse developers, PDE’s Target Platform and Target Definitions make this process effortless. You can define and share you dependencies with your team. If you are missing a dependency, it can be automatically provisioned and placed on your build-path.
Eclipse 3.6 is hitting the shelves (or at least the download mirrors) in 1 week, and to celebrate this release I’ve been counting down the Top 10 features I’m most excited about. Number 6 on my list is the Improvements to Target Platform Management.
In Eclipse 3.6 you will be able to search repositories and quickly add components from these repositories to your target platform (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A).
In addition to this, a new quickfix allows you to search repositories for a missing import package and have a bundle supplying the package added to your target.
Finally, one of the biggest headaches for release engineers is collecting all these bundles that constitute your target. There is now a new export wizard that will export all the bundles in your target to a single directory. The tool will also generate a p2 repository. This repository can then be used in your build as a repoBaseLocation.
A big thanks goes out to Chris Aniszczyk and his army of Minions for this work ;-).