Lóránd Somogyi

My frustration about Eclipse P2 from the last time grows…

I just wanted to add documentation for few plug-ins today. As usually those documentations are also plug-ins. P2 here we go…

Found the plug-ins in no time. Install…

And wait, wait, wait… (about 5-20 minutes!) while my eclipse is locked, as P2 is modal. Why? At least let me work while P2 figures out if those plug-ins would fit my installation.

Fortunately I can send the install part, – if everything is fine for P2, – to work in background, but that does not lasts so long usually.

As I learned so many times that things ain’t what they look like, I started to browse the Net (after 3h of cooldown). And I found a lot of pro and contra. There is even a recept how to replace P2 with UM.

Now as I retraced the whole thing one again, I can understand both parties. Developers are probably frustrated, while simple users are happy with it, – or at least will be…

I still do not feel P2 mature enough to replace UM (Update Manager), as there are missing features and obvious bugs.

Missing stuff:

• Resolve dependencies automatically – there are a hell a lot of plug-ins, sometimes I just can’t gather myself what do I need. – You need to know the software you’re installing… – this is no good for simple users…
• Show information about the plug-in and its dependencies. Instead of right click, properties…

I’m still frustrated, and I hope it is just because of the absence of the knowledge.

I still need to pull up my plug-ins for 3.4, so I’ll be learning soon…

Yesterday Ganymede arrieved. Fresh new Eclipse 3.4 and a tons of plugins as usually.

Some nice new features, feels like a bit faster. But! P2, the new “update system”… grrr. Okay, the old one was bad, I know. But it did work. It took me usually about 30 minutes to assemble an eclipse-jee with AJDT, subversive, q4e, mylyn exts and to import some of my workspaces. Today, with Ganymede and P2 it took me about 4 hours. Ouch. And I still do not have AJDT, and no dependency viewer from q4e.

I hope this will stabilize, and that this will pay off…

Just need to emulate how would an application work in 3 month, or after 2010, or whatever. Think twice before you just change your system time to test.

If you really need to do it, do it from within virtualization. Or…

Or you might face strange effects when you switch back to current time. Some applications depend on files last modified date. And some would check for biggest time ever, to protect them self from using  trial for ever…

In our case after switching back to normal time Eclipse WTP just stopped publishing to server… guess why…

We have a strange animal: A web application with really lots of jars. (Today total of 273 JARs.)

We use Maven 2, Eclipse with WTP, Tomcat, Q4E, etc.., but from these technologies only Eclipse, WTP and Tomcat are relevant for the problem I’d like to describe. Most of developer machines runs Windows XP, and some Windows 2000, and just few Linux.

As we use Maven 2, the jars came form ${user.home}/.m2/repository/ folder. We just let Q4E set up the path for our projects inside Eclipse. For some reason we stack with Q4E 0.3.0, and we tweaked the WTP Server (Tomcat) launch settings, to have all JARs included. We did not used “served modules without publishing”, nor “J2EE Module Dependencies” for few (here) non-relevant reasons.

After adding few new modules (JARs) to the webapp, for few developers the Tomcat Server just failed to start. No log, and nothing in the debug view, nor in the error view. Eclipse WTP were just waiting for Tomcat to start… forever… We were bitterly searching for solution/bug. With no luck. After adding even more JARs, even more developers were complaining: the same problem.

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I use Eclipse as my primary IDE under Ubuntu Linux (now Hardy). IMHO it’s a great combination. Stable, fast, clean. But from time to time, as Eclipse evolves, and there are more and more plugins I use, I ran into strange erratic behaviour of Eclipse. First there were the nasty problem with PermGenSpece, and now this…

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