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Re: [pde-dev] Target UI Discussion
Title: Re: [pde-dev] Target UI Discussion
The following comes from my two years of work writing OSGi based server-side software, and doing all of that in Eclipse PDE.

I must say I really like using the p2 repositories as a backing for targets, but I agree there are times when I just want a folder or list of folder full of bundles to simplify things.

It would be nice to be able to extend a target definition. That is, have a base set of minimal bundles in a base target definition, and create other target definitions that say “Base plus this stuff ...”. Of course, you would want that to n-levels.

I would like to be able to define a bunch  target definitions, and then associate a PDE project with the definition. Then that project always uses that definition. This effectively lets me work on different parts of the solution at the same time, in the same workspace.

When developing code you type: SomeClass sc = new SomeClass
And hit CTRL-Space to generate an import. This should have another helper in the list to search the target platform for potential matches, then update the manifest with an import, and do the java import. To be efficient, this may require some kind of indexing operation on the target platform, and this feature could be disabled until that index is built.

A really cool feature would be to integrate p2 with maven so that:
  1. You write a maven pom to depend on all the bundles you wish from a maven repository.
  2. You use that pom to create a p2 repository where all the p2 metadata lives, but the bundles themselves are still in the maven repository.
  3. You can use this in a target definition.

Basically you are using maven to manage the artifacts only. Maven has nice repositories like artifactory to manage artifacts, and this is currently missing from p2.

Writing enterprise software in OSGi right now is a bit of a challenge using PDE, which has a definite skew towards developing Eclipse plugins. Some of these things would help a lot.

--
Best Regards,

Don Laidlaw | Sr. Research Engineer | Infor | office: +1 902-576-5185 | mobile: +1 902-401-6771 | don.laidlaw@xxxxxxxxx



From: Curtis Windatt <Curtis_Windatt@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "Eclipse PDE general developers list." <pde-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:34:35 -0400
To: "pde-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <pde-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Susan Franklin McCourt <susan_franklin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [pde-dev] Target UI Discussion

A short meeting was held to discuss the target definition user interface and what changes we might want to see in 3.6.  We are happy with the overall flow of the current UI and don't want to disrupt current workflows.  However, there are changes to the underlying models that will affect the UI, we want to see target definitions better integrated with p2, and there are a number of bugs we want to see fixed.  The discussion is summarized on the PDE wiki.  If anyone else in the community would like to express their thoughts, please add some discussion points to the wiki page or bring it up on this mailing list.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/PDE/Meetings/20091015 <http://wiki.eclipse.org/PDE/Meetings/20091015>

Curtis

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