Some of you may have seen Yoxos 5 at EclipseCon 2011.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, Yoxos 5 is a tool that enables the creation of a profile that describes your Eclipse installation. Another developer can start the same Eclipse installation by clicking on a .yoxos file. Yoxos will download and install all necessary plugins, set the preferences, connect to the source code repository and even show you the tasks from your bug tracker. These items are continuously updated with changes.  For example,  if you add a new plugin to your daily development environment, all team members will automatically get an update. Ian’s talk at EclipseCon 2011 showed how this can be used to get developers working on an open-source project quickly, e.g. for a “bugday”. The full team service is freely available for open-source projects.

In the latest release, we’ve added another much-requested feature:  the provisioning of target platform definitions. The basic idea is that you can provision target platform definitions with Yoxos and set one target platform to activate by default. The target platform itself can be on an update site, in your workspace or anywhere else. Using a local folder or an Eclipse installation may not make too much sense, unless these sources can be downloaded by other users. You can configure the target definition in the normal way, using the PDE UI. Once you have added it to your profile, it can be used by all developers on the team.

You can activate Target Provisioning in the launcher from the tab “Workspace Provisioning”

Then,  you’ll see a new tab in the application:

Once you have set your target platform definitions, you can import them from your IDE into a profile (via the magnet button).

By checking one of the target definitions in the table, you’ve set the default that will be activated on start-up of the installation.

Note that you should remove the target platform definition file from plugins that are provisioned by the team provider. Otherwise you will get the the same target platform twice, once provisioned by the SCM, once provisioned by Yoxos. The Yoxos provisioned target definition always has a postfix “provisioned by Yoxos” to distinguish them. In general, moving the target definition out of your workspace might be good practice, as changes to the target platform can then be managed by the same person who configures the Yoxos profile.

You can give Yoxos 5 a test drive – visit http://eclipsesource.com/yoxos5. Let us know what you think about Yoxos and target provisioning.

Tags: platform, provisioning, target, yoxos

Over the last few days I’ve read many blogs from folks who are speaking at EclipseCon next week in Santa Clara. Everytime I find it really interesting to hear about the ideas behind the talks. So, with this post I want to show you what you can expect from the EclipseSource folks at EclipseCon.

First we’ll have a chance to meet every morning. EclipseSource is the activity sponsor again this year. What does this mean? This means that the first 50 people will get a cool running shirt and everyone will get the opportunity to meet Eclipse committers away from the conference stress. After the jogging you won’t have to wait long to hear from us again.

The first event is on Tuesday at 2:00 pm. You can meet Ian Bull and listen to him speaking about growing an open source project. He will show you how easy it is to get in touch with your favorite open source project by contributing to it.  He will demo how to overcome the major hurdles to becoming a first class contributor.

If you can’t get enough of Ian you will have a second chance to listen to him after a short break. On Tuesday at 4:00 pm he will show you everything you need to know about p2 together with Kim Moir and Pascal Rapicault. They will show you how to get around the biggest pain points in p2 and pointers for best practices.

If p2 is not your favorite topic and you want to go deep into some hardcore stuff, then I recommend attending Johannes Eickhold’s talk. It’s in the same slot as the p2 talk and is entitled, “Sovereign: Migrating Java Threads to Improve Availability of Web Applications“.  Johannes will describe two technical strategies on how to improve availability in RAP, a very interesting problem with big implications for RAP.

Because EclipseCon is full of good talks, you don’t have to wait long for the next one. Take a look ahead at RAP together with Ralf Sternberg at 4:30 pm. He will take you on a tour inside our plans with RAP and show some really cool demos. This talk also marks the end of this packed Tuesday for us.

But luckily the Wednesday is not far away.  Meet Ian again at 5:30 pm . He will show you some really cool demos on the hot new products showcase reception. This is a great opportunity to go into detail together with Ian.

After meeting Ian again you can take a break from us. But, only until 7:30 pm. Ralf will moderate the RAP BoF and right after this you can join me on the RTP BoF.  The BoFs will give us a full hour to propose ideas and discuss concepts or internals. So, don’t miss them.

Because RTP is a hot new Eclipse Project , in addition to the BoF, you will also have the chance to attend a presentation by me on Thursday 2:30 pm.  As you might already know,  we created the RTP project to enable more developers to use EclipseRT. In my talk,  “Eclipse Runtimes out of the Box“, you can hearing everything there is to know about RTP in 20 minutes.

In addition to this schedule there is more. Of course, you will find all of us at the Hyatt every evening .  I’m really looking forward to meeting you there…

Tags: eclipsecon, p2, rap, rtp, sovereign, yoxos

I have tons of Eclipse workspaces. The last time I counted it was around 24, but it actually changes on a daily basis.

With some of my workspaces I want to have a similar IDE as with others, but some IDEs require special plug-ins. A while ago, as I still unzipped Eclipse-downloads, this was a huge pain. Every time I wanted to work in a specific workspace I had to remember which IDE I used for what, then find the workspace location on the disk, before I could do anything.

Permanent workspaces

Now I double-click a .yoxos file on my Desktop, then start working. Related .yoxos files hang out together on different areas on my desktop. This is possible with the Yoxos 5 Launcher which I explained in my last blog post.

I associate the workspace I want to start in terms of “upper right” or “vaguely in the middle, left” on the screen. No need to remember long directory names.
Remember, a .yoxos file is a definition of both the workspace and the IDE that works on the workspace. The actual workspace is somewhere in my home directory. Since every .yoxos file defines a separate IDE, I always click “Use this as default” after defining the first time where the workspace is located.

Temporary workspaces

Throwaway workspaces go to /tmp. Along with everything else in /tmp, they will be deleted the next time I reboot. The .yoxos file that defines a throwaway workspace should be deleted with it, so this belongs to /tmp as well. The IDE definition works this way:

• Start the Yoxos Launcher
• Add “Project SDK” and all the other desired plug-ins
• Save the .yoxos file to “/tmp/throwaway-workspace” (a new empty directory)
• Hit “Launch”

With the bundle pool I don’t worry about the plug-ins that compose the throwaway IDE. Only rarely something new gets downloaded anyway.

.yoxos files and workspaces

A special handling of .yoxos files in otherwise empty directories supports this workflow. If a .yoxos file is is started while residing in an empty directory, the IDE uses this directory as workspace. This provides an easy answer to the question about the “where”, and I use this feature at a regular basis.

On Mac OS X, I can append the extension “.yoxosws” to a directory that contains a .yoxos file. This defines a workspace that I can start directly with a double-click, without bothering about opening a folder to access the .yoxos file.

Conclusion

The Yoxos 5 Launcher makes it simple to handle a multitude of workspaces. The best thing is that you can stop wondering about the IDE contents and start thinking about workspaces. The Launcher provides a consistent UI to define new IDEs, including a huge number of 3rd-party plug-ins that are not shipped with the default Eclipse downloads.

Tags: yoxos

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

Tags: eclipse, yoxos

The Yoxos team has been really busy as of late. The free Yoxos OnDemand download service is getting lots of new function and with the release of Galileo SR1 last week, the OnDemand repositories have been updated to include all the latest Eclipse bundles.  Thousands of people use the free Yoxos service to reliably get and maintain their Eclipse tooling.  Now they can get the latest Eclipse and thousands of compatible components in one spot!

At the same time as doing all that, we worked to get the Yoxos SecureSource validation process certified by TÜV. Turns out that the TÜV certification is perhaps the news of biggest impact to the community. It means that you can now get thousands of OSGi and Eclipse components that have been validated as trustworthy using a process certified by an internationally recognized standards body.

Most Germans will know TÜV from the inspection they have to do for their cars every two years. TÜV engineers certify cars as roadworthy and safe. But TÜV does way more than that. It is a global organization specialized in testing, inspecting and certifying product safety, quality and usability in many areas. We looked around the office and found the all of these everyday TÜV certified things.

In addition to things impacting your physical safety, TÜV certifies all manner of software including virus checkers and now software component validation processes.

Why is this interesting?

Basically there are whole industries out there that cannot use Eclipse and open source because it’s seen as untrusted. This certification of Yoxos SecureSource means that Eclipse and OSGi can be used in security critical applications or mission critical toolchains where trust and validation are key concerns. More users of Eclipse in more domains means a bigger ecosystems and more adoption. Good news for everyone!

For fun, we looked around the office and found the all of these everyday TÜV certified things and thought it would be cool to run a contest. The first person to correctly identify 5 of the pictured TÜV certified products wins a free lifetime subscription to our new super secret Yoxos product coming out by the end of the year.

Submit your entry by commenting on this post.

Tags: eclipse, galileo, OSGi, securesource, TÜV, yoxos

Where do you find your bundles?  When a new version of the Eclipse IDE is released do you spend the day (or week) tracking down all your favorite tools?  Of course we have a the Eclipse SDK and a bunch of pre-built packages. We also have the release train with a number of Eclipse projects, but what if you want bundles that are not hosted at Eclipse.org?  What about tools like Checkstyle, ANTRL, and EclEmma?  What bundles do you need for your version of Eclipse?  Do these conflict with existing plugins?

On Thursday, Jordi and I will be presenting a Webinar about Yoxos, our free Eclipse download service.  Yoxos brings together a large collection of Eclipse and 3rd party bundles into one convienent location.  Yoxos started as a Eclipse distribution in 2004 (much like a Linux distribution), but it has grown into a complete provisioning solution for Eclipse users.  Using Yoxos On Demand, you can create a custom distribution from over 4,000 different bundles.

In the webinar, we will talk about how we built Yoxos, how you can construct a custom distribution and share it with co-workers, how you can share your workspace settings with others, and the future of Yoxos.  We will also talk about some exicting new things we are doing at EclipseSource and provisioning in general.

Please join us on Thursday at 11:00am Eastern Time.

Tags: webinar, yoxos