I'm not really familiar with eclipse. Could you please explain what
advantages your proposal has over building your project with maven?
From your description I would guess that using maven as your build
system provides all the features you want with more automation.
many thanks,
david jencks
On May 2, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Jeffrey Liu wrote:
Hi,
I want to propose a centralized Eclipse update manager site for Apache
projects/software. This may not be the correct place to ask this, but I
can find a better place to do it, so I decided to start here. If this
is
not the right place, can somebody point me to the correct location?
Thanks! Reason I propose an Eclipse update manager site for Apache
projects/software is because Eclipse projects such as the Web Tools
Platform (WTP) project often reuses software that are provided by
Apache,
for example, Axis, Tomcat, Derby, etc... Often times, these Apache
software are not redistributed by the Eclipse projects, but instead,
they
are listed as prerequisites. This means, end users must first download
the
Eclipse project and all the Apache software prereq by the project, and
configure these software in the Eclipse project before they can get
started. This is error prone and hampers the out-of-the-box experience.
Imagine the following scenario:
A user downloads WTP. Unzip it and starts it up. S/he wants to create
an
Axis Web service. S/he launches the wizard that creates a Web service,
but
finds out s/he needs Tomcat and Axis. So s/he opens up her Web browser,
goes to the Apache Web site and looks for the download page for Tomcat
and
Axis. S/he downloads and unzips Tomcat and Axis to the file system.
Goes
back to WTP and manually configures Tomcat and Axis into her workspace.
S/he launches the wizard again and move on.
This is easier than said. If there's an Eclipse update manager site for
Apache software, then when the user finds out s/he needs Tomcat and
Axis,
all s/he needs to do now is launch the Eclipse update manager (URL to
the
Apache update site will be preloaded), select Tomcat and Axis and click
Finish. The Eclipse update manager will download, install and configure
Tomcat and Axis automatically. This is much better than asking the
user to
download and configure things manually. Also, this Eclipse update
manager
site is very useful when new versions of a Apache software is
available.
For example:
Say Eclipse WTP 1.0 ships with Axis 1.2 support. If later on, Axis
releases a critical fix for Axis 1.2's WSDL2Java emitter, then without
an
update site, we'll need to do one of the following...
1. Rebuild WTP 1.0 with the Axis fix
2. Ask users to manually update WTP
3. Wait for the next version of WTP.
None of the above sound attractive. If there's an Eclipse update
manager
site setup for Apache, then end users can search and install new
updates
automatically by making just a few clicks. I believe this advances the
integration between open source software that are provided in different
domains (Apache, Eclipse, etc). I think this can benefit the open
source
community and can grow the open source ecosystem.
Do I need to propose a new Apache project for something like this?
Suggestions/comments are welcomed.
Thanks,
Jeffrey Liu
IBM Rational Software - Performance Analyst
IBM Toronto Lab.
8200 Warden Ave. Markham, Ontario, L6G 1C7
Internal mail: D3/R8V/8200/MKM (D3-268)
T/L: 969 3531
Tel: (905) 413 3531
Fax: (905) 413 4920
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