Re: [pde-dev] Target UI Discussion (Don)

[Curtis Windatt <Curtis_Windatt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Even as we move towards using p2 repositories,
we will continue to support pointing at local directories.  However,
to support new p2 based features in building/exporting, we need metadata
for everything in the target.  Hopefully this will be transparent
to the user, they can still select a folder, but we would generate metadata
behind the scenes.

The idea of having new targets based
on other targets has come up before, though I can't find a bug report for
it.  I don't think we are going to support 'templates' where targets
include other targets (and updating the parent target updates the children).
 However, being able to duplicate and extend another target is quite
reasonable.  When creating a new target, the first page of the wizard
offers different ways of creating the target.  While we are considering
moving/hiding that page (most people we talk to just create targets from
scratch), the options will be available somewhere, and it would be straightforward
to offer an option to duplicate another target.  Alternatively we
could consider some sort of 'duplicate' button on the main preference page.

Associating projects with definitions
is one of our long term goals (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=159072).
 I don't think we will be able to get to it in 3.6 and there are major
hurdles to overcome, but it is definitely on our radar.

There are already some quickfixes to
add manifest dependencies, but they could be vastly improved.  If
you enter a full import statement that can't be found, there is a quickfix
to help set up the dependency.  We are looking at ways of quickly
adding missing things to your target (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=291227)
and will hopefully be improving some of the quickfixes as part of that.

If a Maven repo can produce a p2 repo,
you can add it to your target.  I'm not sure if the artifacts in your
maven repo would be copied to the target metadata or not.

Yes, PDE was once a tool for Eclipse
plug-in developers, but we are making efforts to make PDE a full featured
bundle development environment :)

It's great to see this kind of discussion,
keep the comments coming!

Curtis

From:	Don Laidlaw <Don.Laidlaw@xxxxxxxxx>
To:	"Eclipse PDE general developers list." <pde-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:	2009/10/16 08:13 AM
Subject:	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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