on May 11th, 2010A new era of managing Eclipse installations has begun
Back in the old days, maintaining an Eclipse installation was easy. You just downloaded the Eclipse; it included the JDK and you used this Eclipse on all your workspaces.
But the number of useful plug-ins increased, and many are not included in the downloads from eclipse.org. Developers use different plug-ins in different workspace. For some developers, this leads to as many Eclipse installations as workspaces. Others capitulated and just don’t use many plug-ins even though they see their value; but managing the installations is just too hard. Others again have one huge installation that includes about everything for all the workspaces, and they too have pain with plug-in dependencies. They all suffer from plug-in dependencies.
Imagine you had a system where each plug-in you use is downloaded just once and reused whenever you need it for a new Eclipse IDE.
Yoxos 5 provides that.
Imagine you could just start your workspace and your IDE starts up including all plug-ins you want to work with in that workspace. If it is a new workspace you’d have automatically adjusted predefined settings, import projects etc.
Yoxos 5 excels at that.
Yoxos 5 unifies the workspace settings and its IDE description in a Yoxos Profile. A Yoxos Profile can be defined in a .yoxos file. The Yoxos Launcher creates Yoxos Profiles and starts them, for example when double-clicking the .yoxos file. Plug-ins are downloaded to the bundle pool and started only if the profile includes them.
Yoxos 5 is now in beta phase. You can try it out now:
- Download and install the Yoxos Launcher
- Download and start one of the sample profiles (further down at the download page)
Get more information at http://eclipsesource.com/yoxos5
Related posts:
- Eclipse — Managing your upgrade path
- How to structure two dozen Eclipse workspaces
- Yoxos 5.5 and Eclipse 3.7.2
- Where do you get your bundles from?
- Target provisioning with Yoxos
I think this really looks/sounds good!
All of these worthwile plugins can increase complexity of the workspace/installation management by their sheer number.
I may give it a try!
I use Yoxos-eclipse for two years now and I can’t imagine installing Eclipse the ‘old’ way ever.
Since I’m using yoxos I’ve never had any issues with dependencies. I’m still on yoxos 4 BTW, but that’s already good enough for me.
I don’t want to use cutting edge nightly builds beta releases, I need stability, yoxos is my friend.
Sounds not only good but an efficient way to do things, specially when we are working on 2-3 projects simultaneously.
I must give it a try!
Why a 30 day trial? “Yoxos on demand” was free. Is this not free?
Also, there’s no way to add plugins that are not in the yoxos repository (that I could see). The previous yoxos releases still let you add your own custom plugins/extensions.
I’d like to see the previous “on demand” mode updated to use 3.6.
Or, a some freedom for 3rd party extension add-ons not blessed by yoxos.
And some clarification of the licensing.