In one week, on June 26th 2013, Eclipse Kepler will ship. To prepare for the release I'm counting down the Top 10 most interesting features according to me. Number 2 on my list is close to my heart -- the Eclipse Provisioning Platform (p2) -- and the new features it supports. The Eclipse Provisioning Platform (p2) has been responsible for installing and managing Eclipse plug-ins for over...
Read MoreFor most people, p2 is simply the Install Software Dialog in Eclipse. While this is certainly true (or at least the Install Software Dialog is built with p2), p2 is much more than this. The Eclipse Provisioning Platform (p2) is a general purpose platform for provisioning everything and nothing in particular. Most of the out-of-the-box p2 tools are related to provisioning OSGi bundles (or Eclipse plug-ins, if you...
Read MoreOverview This article describes how to install Eclipse plug-ins from an update site (p2 repository) that is hosted on an HTTP(s) server with a self-signed (SSL) certificate. The Problem If you try and connect to a p2 repository on a server with a self-signed cert, you will more than likely hit the following error. Looking closely at the log, and you will see: javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticated at sun.security.ssl.SSLSessionImpl.getPeerCertificates(SSLSessionImpl.java:397) at...
Read MoreEver wondered how you can create a p2 repository from an arbitrary bunch of pre-built Eclipse bundles and features? OK, you might also be wondering why you would want to do that. Let me give you a 'real world' situation where I badly needed to package p2 repos. On an RCP Project that I coached last year we switched from PDE-build to Maven Tycho. In our target...
Read MoreThere are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors. (reference) I appears that P2 (em, p2) suffers from both of these things, but today I'm going to focus on the first one, caching problems. No matter what we do regarding caching repositories, it seems that we get it wrong. Some people argue that we don't cache aggressively enough...
Read MoreEclipse has provided high-quality tools to millions of developers for over 10 years, for free. For the 7th consecutive year, Eclipse will ship a simultaneous release. A simultaneous release is a single, coordinated, release containing dozens of related Eclipse technologies. And for the 5th time, I'm assembling a Top 10 List of Eclipse features that I'm excited about. I've done this for: Eclipse Europa (2007) Eclipse Galileo (2009) Eclipse...
Read MoreComposite repositories make it easy to maintain different versions of a software in a single repository. The idea is to have one public p2 repository that delegates to a number of child repositories. Once you have a new build, you can easily add it to the composite repository and remove some obsolete builds. The child repositories can be anywhere, but it's simple to keep them...
Read MoreOn Tuesday, Pascal and I presented "p2, your savior or your achilles heel? Everything an Eclipse team needs to know about p2" where we talked about the 10 most common pitfalls developers face when using p2. More importantly, we talked about how you can avoid them. For those of you who attended the talk, thank-you. I hope you learned something. For those of you who...
Read MoreMy highlights on the EclipseCon today were the EMF GWT presentation by Ed Merks, the p2 talk by Ian Bull and Pascal Rapicault and the keynote on Watson by David Gondek: Ed Merks showed how to use EMF with the Google Web Toolkit. In about a click or two, he had an EMF-based GWT application (or an GWT-based EMF application) up and running. The famous library...
Read MoreOver 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...
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