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| <tr><td style="background:#0080C0"><b><span style="color:white">Proposal</span></b></td></tr> |
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| <h1>Deployment Packs</h1> |
| |
| <blockquote> <b>Summary</b> <br> |
| Deploying an RCP based application involves constructing a complete Eclipse install. |
| As such, any third-party, platform-specific fragments and Eclipse |
| launchers (executables) must be included in the deployment for each target |
| platform. This is in contrast to deploying add-on function typical of tooling |
| scenarios which contain mostly developer written and platform-independent plug-ins. |
| This document describes a deployment pack download which simplifies the construction |
| of complete RCP applications for multiple platforms. |
| <p> |
| <font size="-1">Last modified: October 21, 2004</font> |
| </blockquote> |
| <p> |
| <h3>Background</h3> |
| <p>Developers are setup with development and target Eclipse installs for one platform. |
| They merrily configure their target and write their code, launching and debugging |
| as they go. When it comes time however to deploy their application, they face |
| a challenge -- their target includes only the launcher (Eclipse executable) |
| and fragments for their current target platform. This is disappointing because |
| Eclipse, and in fact Java, is platform independent. In general, an application |
| written for one application should at least run on other supported platforms. |
| <p>Currently the workaround for this is cumbersome, very manual and thus |
| very error-prone. It goes something |
| like this:</p> |
| <ol> |
| <li>Download the appropriate Eclipse drops for all of the target platforms</li> |
| <li>Unzip them over top of one another in your target directory</li> |
| <li>Check-out the platform-launcher project from dev.eclipse.org</li> |
| <li>Check-out the org.eclipse.platform-feature project from dev.eclipse.org</li> |
| <li>Carefully and manually rename the org.eclipse.platform feature to match your |
| requirements. Take care to update the build.properties and other elements |
| as appropriate. Alternatively you can create a simple feature and copy/update |
| the build.properties |
| from org.eclipse.platform-feature.</li> |
| <li><include> or otherwise identify your new feature in your product's feature structure.</li> |
| </ol> |
| <h3>Proposed Solution</h3> |
| <p>To make this easier we propose that Eclipse.org supply a <em>deployment pack</em> download which effectively eliminates steps 1-5 outlined above. The deployment |
| pack is a single zip containing all possible (platform-specific) fragments |
| for all of the Eclipse SDK as well as a special feature which contains launchers |
| and |
| essential |
| root |
| files (e.g., startup.jar) for all supported platforms.</p> |
| <p>Using this deployment pack allows steps 1-5 to be compressed into |
| <ol> |
| <li>Download the deployment pack and unzip into the target directory</li> |
| <li><include> the launcher feature in your product's feature structure</li> |
| </ol> |
| <p>The deployment pack is approximately 15MB in total. The bulk of this |
| is taken up by SWT fragments (8 @ 1.5MB each). Another 2.5MB for all the launchers |
| and a bit here and there for other fragments. The net result however is a setup |
| which allows users to write their applications on one machine and build deployable |
| zips etc. for all possible configurations with the push of a button.</p> |
| <p>Creating the deployment pack can be reasonably integrated into the current build |
| infrastructure.</p> |
| <h3>Alternatives</h3> |
| <p>The need for deployment packs is felt mostly in RCP scenarios. As such, we could |
| consider including the contents of the deployment pack in the RCP SDK drop |
| proper. Unfortunatly this doubles the size of the SDK drop (currently |
| 17MB) and clutters the target environment. Further there is still a need for |
| platform specific RCP SDK drops to carry the appropriate source. So the additional |
| 15MB would be replicated 8 times in the various RCP SDK zips.</p> |
| <h3>References</h3> |
| <ul> |
| <li> <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=76725">76725</a></li> |
| </ul> |
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