Thursday, May 22, 2008

A p2 Success Story

With all the good / bad and the ugly posted about p2 lately, I thought I would share a positive experience I had today with Eclipse, Modeling and p2.

It all started when I saw a new video about ECore tools. If you haven't seen ECore tools, and you are a fan of EMF, you really should check it out. (It will likely be featured in my Ganymede Top 10 List). After the video I decided to take ECore tools for test run.

1. Grabbed the latest Ganymede milestone for modelers.

2. I launched Eclipse and tried to create an Ecore Diagram (using Ecore tools)

Problerm: the Ganymede package for modelers doesn't contain ECore tools.

3. I launched Help->Software Updates and searched for ECore tools



4. Ok, no ECore tools... So I selected "Manage Sites" and selected the Ganymede Site



5. Now when I search for ECore tools, p2 returns some Installable Units



6. After selecting Install, and accepting the license, Eclipse suggested I restart



7. And in less than 5 minutes, I was up and running with ECore tools.



While I realize that there are still bugs / features / requests outstanding, this was the first time in all the simultaneous releases that it truly felt like I could just point at a piece of software, and have it up and running without worrying about dependencies, 3-5 minutes to load the UM, broken connections, etc...

I know p2 doesn't work for everyone, but the negative comments often seem to overshadow the positive ones, so I thought I would share with everyone the good experience I had.

Note: I did not write this to start a war, or downplay the problems people are having; this was simply my experience today.