[news.eclipse.tools.hyades] Hyades 3.0 - an experience report

["Chris Laffra" <Chris_Laffra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I tried to run Hyades 3.0 on Eclipse 3.0. I can profile "Hello World",
but when I try a runtime workbench nothing happens. The process
launches, Hyades is collecting, and then the process terminates.
After 2 hours of study, I found out Hyades 3.0 is connecting to a
RAServer started as a service at XP boot?  That has a default VM
of version 1.3.1, which is not enough to run Eclipse 3.0 on.
This server was from a really old WSAD installation I happened
to have installed on my machine.

What puzzles me is why Hyades ignores the JRE setting on the
launch configuration and chooses the one a random RAServer
tells it to use. Why do we even need a server to set up a connection
between 2 processes that know each other well?

After passing -consoleLog, I saw the above error. It would be nice
if Hyades passes that in by default (as it does with -clean).

Now, after killing the RAserver process, and running the Hyades 3.0
version, and setting up a 1.4.2 VM, I can profile Eclipse startup.
The issue now is that I see very little data coming by. No matter
what I select, there seems to be lots of profile data being lost.
I turned off all filters I could find.

Installation of Hyades is cumbersome. You really need an update
site, and have a feature with an install handler to set up the RAserver.
Currently, it is too much a manual process. Extracting zip files into
the plug-ins directory is really bad style. The update manager is
much nicer, as it allows me to install and remove an entire feature.
Same argument is for GEF and EMF.

Finally, can you coordinate the documentation offered by all
the Hyades plug-in projects? You really pollute Help > Help Contents.
And..., why does Hyades need so many plug-ins? I checked out the
most of them (165) leaving out the user doc plug-ins. If I want
to find something, I have no clue where to start.

In your CVS instructions, you could point out that the
repository to attach to is directory /home/tools at
dev.eclipse.org. The instructions suggest /home/eclipse, and
it took me lots of intuition to guess the proper directory.

Conclusion: nice tools, hard to install and get working.

Hope this helps,
Chris Laffra