Ian is an Eclipse committer and EclipseSource Distinguished Engineer with a passion for developer productivity.
He leads the J2V8 project and has served on several …
p2 and Agile Software Development
One of the key aspects of Agile Software Development – or any iterative software development process – is keeping your customer in-the-loop. In order for customers to have a voice in the software development process they must continually consume your software, provide feedback, and witness the results of that feedback. In a small setting this might not be to hard. But when you mix in a variety of different configurations, distributed development teams, and distributed customers – delivering and updating software can become a challenge.
Not only do your customers need to acquire the proper configurations, and stay up-to-date as the software is developed, your development team must also be developing against the latest code base. Again, in small teams it might be practical to checkout the entire codebase from your SCM system, but does this scale to multi-million line systems?
The Equinox/p2 project provides a powerful provisioning platform that can be used to help deliver software in number of different forms. At EclipseCon this year, Kim Moir and I will be exploring how you can use p2 as a platform to help enable agile software development. While the tutorial will focus on how p2 can facilitate agile software development, the tutorial will also provide a good overview for anyone getting started with p2 and PDE/Build.
In particular, we will discuss how to:
- Create, publish and provision a variety of product configurations
- Enable automatic updates within your products
- Craft and manage target platforms
The hands on exercises will explore the new p2 API, PDE/Build and many of the headless p2 applications. The exercises will be based off the Hyperbola chat client from the new Eclipse RCP Book. (We may even have a preview of the book on display at the tutorial). If you are interested in how to streamline the deployment of your software, are looking for an update mechanism for RCP or OSGi based applications, or are just curious about p2, please feel free to attend our tutorial.