Eclipse update site mechanism

The life of release family continues after its initial release e. Isolating release families to their own update sites helps maintain a separation between development going on for the next release family and maintenance work on the previous family. Update sites are not possible unless we use the Eclipse version numbering scheme effectively. The main challenge is for plug-ins to have version numbers that accurately relate to their content. The essential element here is to ensure that if two plug-ins have the same id and version, their content is identical.

The easiest way to do this is to use the version qualifier i. For normal not nightly builds, the qualifier should be the version tag from the map file used for the build which generated them e. The map file defines the content going into the build. If that does not change, then we can assume that the content of the output plug-in will not change. In this way, identical plug-ins will not be duplicated on the update site and consumers will not have to download them if they already have them.

For more detail on plugin versioning, see the Plug-in Versioning Proposal. Features on the other hand are collections of plug-ins. They are also relatively small. Since the content of a feature is indirectly defined by the content of the plug-ins included in the feature, it is hard to detect change. The safe bet here is to use the build stamp as the qualifier for feature version e.

This has the benificial effect of clearly identifying the features for a particular build. Further, since the entire feature set is regenerated, the collection of features with the same version number completely defines the entire build output.

Nightly builds do not go into an update site. There is no easy way to correlate the content in a nightly build out of HEAD with that of an integration build using versioned resources. As a result, all plug-ins would be new and the economies of the proposed solution would not be realized.

Further, nightly builds are primarily there for the individual teams to ensure they have not adversely affected other components etc. That is, they do not figure prominently in the scenarios driving this proposal. Plug-in directories currently reflect the id and version of the plug-in.

It is unlikely but this may push some path length limits. Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I am using GitHub to develop an Eclipse plugin. I would like to have a public Eclipse update site for my plugin. Can I use GitHub for this? I know that GitHub can be used for hosting individual files by using the "raw" links provided on the file information pages. Forget the Github project releases feature, that won't work as a true update site see notes at the end.

So for example, for the repository:. Notes: Yes, if you open the update site link in a browser, github will give you no file listings, but rather a But that's fine. The Eclipse update site mechanism doesn't need the parent link to be valid. AFAIK, at no point does the Eclipse update mechanism need the web server to do file listings of a directory. Note2: if you use Github project releases, you can only attach a zipped p2 repository to it.

That is not a proper update site because it is a static repository: there is no URL to which new releases can be uploaded to.

Github pages may not properly serve large binary files as explained in this issue. It may be fine if your jars are small but overall they advise against placing binaries there.

Instead they recommend placing binaries in the download section of the repository. I'd be happy if this situation changes because it would be very convenient to publish an update site by pushing to github. For now one would have to use their API to programatically upload files in the download section. I have not tested it, but technically, a p2 repository can be defined in any shared path either filesystem-shared or web-based-shared.

The Github Pages feature allows you to host arbitrary folders of files without git turning each file into a github page. No it is not possible anymore, the Downloads API has officially been deprecated. However, some projects need to host and distribute large binary files in addition to source archives.

Check out our help article on distributing large binaries. See this help article on distributing large binaries. I was able to host an Eclipse update site using the GitHub pages feature. I found it difficult to figure out all the pieces I needed, so here's a brief description of the steps I followed. As others have mentioned, GitHub pages don't support huge binary files, so this will only work for small projects.

To see an example, look at my Live Coding in Python project. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? However, you do not have to change any values at the moment.

Once you have reviewed the project structure, we have a look at some implementation details. We will cover the most important parts as the example code in the project you created earlier already contains detailed comments in the code of the implemented methods also have a look at the reference implementation in the org.

Generally, the Number Formatter node takes a data table as input and applies a user specified format String to each Double column of the input table. For simplicity, the output table only contains the formatted numeric columns as String columns.

This basically wraps the functionality of the Java String. The functionality of the node is implemented in the NumberFormatterNodeModel. The super 1, 1 call in the constructor of the node model specifies the number of output and input tables the node should have. In this case it is one input and one output table. The actual algorithm of the node is implemented in the execute method. The method is invoked only after all preceding nodes have been successfully executed and all data is therefore available at the input ports.

The input table will be available in the given array inData which contains as many data tables as specified in the constructor. Hence, the index of the array corresponds to the port index of the node. The persistence of the table e. Furthermore, a BufferedDataTable is able to handle data larger than the size of the main memory as the data will be automatically flushed to disk if necessary.

A table contains DataRow objects, which in turn contain DataCell objects. DataCell s provide the actual access to the data. There are a lot of DataCell implementation for all types of data, e. Additionally, each DataCell implements one or multiple DataValue interfaces. These define which access methods the cell has i. Hence, for each DataValue there could be several compatible DataCell classes. This will create an empty container where you can add rows to.

The added rows must comply with the DataTableSpec the data container was created with. After you are finished adding rows to the container close it via the close method and retrieve the BufferedDataTable with getTable. This way of creating tables is also used in the example code see NumberFormatterNodeModel. Apart from creating a new data container, there are more powerful ways to modify already existing input tables. However, these are not in the scope of this quickstart guide, but you can have a look at the methods of the ExecutionContext.

The execute method should return an array of output BufferedDataTable objects with the length of the number of tables as specified in the constructor. These tables contain the output of the node. The configure method has two responsibilities. First, it has to check if the incoming data table specification is suitable for the node to execute with respect to the user supplied settings.

For example, a user may disallow a certain column type in the node dialog, then we need to check if there are still applicable columns in the input table according to this setting. Second, to calculate the table specification of the output of the node based on the inputs. For example: imagine the Number Formatter node gets a table containing two Double columns and one String column as input. Then this method should return a DataTableSpec do not forget to wrap it in an array containing two DataColumnSpec of type String the Double columns will be formatted to String , all other columns are ignored.

Analogously to the execute method, the configure method is called with an array of input DataTableSpec objects and outputs an array of output DataTableSpec objects containing the calculated table specification. If the incoming table specification is not suitable for the node to execute or does not fit the user provided configuration, throw an InvalidSettingsException with an informative message for the user. These methods handle the loading and saving of settings that control the behaviour of the node, i.

This is used for communication between the node model and the node dialog and to persist the user settings when the workflow is saved. Both methods are called with a NodeSettings object in a read only RO and write only WO version that stores the settings and manages writing or reading them to or from a file. The NodeSettings object is a key-value storage, hence it is easy to write or read to or from the settings object. Just have a look at the provided methods of the NodeSettings object in your Eclipse editor.

In our example, we do not write settings directly to the NodeSettings object as we are using a SettingsModel object to store the user defined format String. SettingsModel objects already know how to write and read settings from the NodeSettings via methods that accept NodeSettings and help to keep settings synchronization between the model and dialog simple. Furthermore, they can be used to create simple dialogs where the loading and saving of settings is already taken care of.

We encourage you to read through the code of the above mentioned classes to get a deeper understanding of all parts of a node. This section describes how to manually deploy your Extension after you have finished the implementation using the Number Formatter Extension as example.