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Posts Tagged with “update”

August 27, 2007
4 Comments

platform.xml and MANAGED_ONLY

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Sometimes I get really strange emails from random people asking for Eclipse help. I guess this goes with the domain of being in the open-source world. I can’t always answer all the emails as that’s not really my day-time job, but my rule of thumb is if I can come up with an answer under a minute, I’ll try to respond. Today I actually got an interesting question…

…how do I prevent people from just “dropping bundles” into an Eclipse product installation and having them appear in my product…

In Eclipse, we have something called the update configurator which scans for new bundles and does the magic of installing them when Eclipse boots. It does this because of something called an “update policy.” By default, Eclipse comes with the USER_EXCLUDE policy which simply will install everything located in that location (see the snippet below). There’s another update policy called MANAGED_ONLY which runs Eclipse with the plug-ins specified via the platform.xml… this will effectively “lockdown” your Eclipse application to only what is specified in the platform.xml file (security through obscurity, right ;p?).


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config date="1185215657453" transient="false" version="3.0">
<site enabled="true" policy="MANAGED_ONLY" updateable="true" url="platform:/base/">
<feature id="org.eclipse.rcp.source" url="features/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.0.v20070607-8y8eE8NEbsN3X_fjWS8HPNG/" version="3.3.0.v20070607-8y8eE8NEbsN3X_fjWS8HPNG">
</feature>
...

August 5, 2007
10 Comments

Web development is so 90’s

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I meant to blog about this earlier, but I was in Italy with limited Internet access. People that know me personally, know that I tend to use the quote “enterprise web development is so 90’s.” There’s very few things in life that have turned me off from programming than the whole JEE stack. EJBs and everything around it can go rot in a fire.

Ok, now that I’m done my rant, back to my original discussion topic of how web development isn’t so 90’s anymore. Certain people have seen the light and started to move web development to the world of bundles.

I had first hand experience with this a few weeks ago when Dejan said “Chris, update test cases are failing, can you take a look at this bug” (note, this was about 5 minutes before he signed off and went on vacation for 3 weeks :P). As a bundle developer, I can use familiar concepts like extensions and extension points to write web applications. See the Equinox HTTP Quickstart guide for some simple examples. I think within a couple years, this will be common place as vendors move to create tools around these concepts. I mean, application servers are already running on top of OSGi, the next logical step is that these web applications will be packaged as bundles. I’m sure that the Equinox Provisioning work will make it even easier to deploy these applications on servers because this was another pain point when working with web applications.

I’m in the process of writing a tutorial around these ideas, but Jeff and Simon’s short article is a good starting point.

Oh, I forgot to point towards the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) project which is doing stuff that is so 2010 😛