Comments on: MarketPlace Client, Top Eclipse Helios Feature #4

By: Ian Bull

Ian Bull — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:38:19 +0000

@richard,

Thanks for pointing these out. The substring searchers (“myl” for example) works on the Yoxos marketplace, but the Eclipse Marketplace doesn’t support this. Feel free to file a bug against the Eclipse Foundation with this request.

I’m sure there are a few usability problems (“there is nothing to update” is a good example of that), but for the most part I’m been very impressed with the tool. I know you can select multiple items — hit the install button, and then press back and select another thing. Maybe we can work on improving that workflow.

Finally, I don’t know why you can only find one plug-in. Have you tried both marketplaces? I know the Yoxos market has over a thousand listed.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:24:28 +0000

After playing with it a bit, I’m finding it’s not so useful, and sort of buggy. For example, let’s say you want to install mylyn. Searching on “myl” or “myl*” gives you nothing, but “mylyn” gives you mylyn plus some unrelated stuff.
Next, try and install it (or anything else that is already installed – since I’m on JEE now mylyn is already part of the package). Without confirmation, the screen flickers and an error pops up – “there is nothing to update”. Dismiss. Click on next. Same error. Click on back. Click on the “installed” tab (to see if it’s already there, of course). Blank window. Click on the other tabs. All blank. There is a link on the bottom of the screen – “one solution selected” – clicking on it causes eclipse to pause for a second, then return with no change. The marketplace client screen can’t recover from the attempted install of mylyn. The only thing you can do cancel and start over.
Another issue is that you can’t update more than one thing at a time. Once you start the install, you are forced through the download and optional restart, then you have to open the marketplace client and start over. Perhaps for a v2 release they should let you queue up some plugins and install at the same time. However only one plugin was even available through the client (findbugs) so it looks like they have some time.

By: Markus Knauer

Markus Knauer — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:00:31 +0000

If you have the Classic SDK, you can use the standard p2 way of installing the MPC from Helios.

‘Help’ > ‘Install New Software…’ > select the preconfigured Helios repository > open ‘General Purpose Tools’ > select the ‘Market Place Client’. The only drawback of the installation method is that you only get a single Eclipse Marketplace configuration.

A better solution would be to open the p2 installation dialog with the Helios repository, deselect the ‘Group items by category’ and install the ‘EPP Common Package Feature’. If you are installing this feature, you get the Classic SDK with the same Marketplace definition as in the other EPP packages.

By: Ian Bull

Ian Bull — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:50:08 +0000

@Richard,

Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll ping the MPC folks and see if there is an update site so we can install the Marketplace into distributions like ‘Eclipse Classic’.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:01:05 +0000

I see what’s going on now. Only two of the Helios packages have this feature, and neither of them are the eclipse classic package that I prefer. This seems odd, since the people who prefer classic usually do so because it doesn’t start with a bunch of stuff they don’t need, and the first stop after that is to add the plugins we do need. To make matters worse, there is no “marketplace client plugin” to install. I had to actually download the JEE package to have the feature.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:12:54 +0000

There is no “Eclipse -> Help”, there is a help menu, but marketplace is not on that menu. Nor is it anywhere in the preferences or help itself. They sure did hide it well, because I can’t find it.

By: Luís Carlos Moreira da Costa

Luís Carlos Moreira da Costa — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:06:05 +0000

@Great post!

@Thanks!

By: David Green

David Green — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:23:50 +0000

Ian, great post! An interesting note: the Marketplace Client uses those great new p2 APIs that you mentioned in Helios feature #5

By: Del

Del — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:54:25 +0000

Hah, you were too slow on this one, Ian. I beat you to the punch .