Target provisioning with Yoxos

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://yoxos.eclipsesource.com. Let us know what you think about Yoxos and target provisioning.