Providing an All-In-One PDT Eclipse distribution

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Robert Gründler

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May 15, 2013, 4:44:19 AM5/15/13
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Hi all,

after over 2 years of maintaining PDT related plugins, i've come to the following conclusions:
  1. A lot of people have a hard time setting up an eclipse instance to suite their needs for PHP development - with the multitude of all the existing plugins available.
  2. More and more people move over to PHPStorm
The migration to PHPStorm imho has 2 main reasons:
  1. Out-Of-The-Box experience: simply download the thing and start working
  2. Better performance
I think both issues can be addressed by providing a plain Eclipse distribution targeting especially the needs of PHP / Web developers.  By releasing a custom distribution, we can for example provide a tweaked eclipse.ini with optimized JVM settings.

Also, a custom distribution could pre-configure other features to improve the performance / user experience, for example by disabling useless validators etc.

I've therefore started working on a tycho-built eclipse distro based on the following features (so far):

- DLTK 5.0
- PDT 3.2

Another reason why a custom distribution would be an advantage is that we don't have to rely on patches being applied to the Eclipse
runtime, like this one here, which would be a rather great improvement for anyone working with webapplications:


Here's what the distro could provide on an Eclipse-Runtime Level:

- Register an eclipse:// URL protocol, so Stack-Trace links in the browser could be opened directly in eclipse (like Sublimetext or Textmate work on osx)
- Provide a Listener-Extension for the SWT.OpenDocument event, so plugins can import existing projects by drag & drop onto Eclipse 

The product i'm working on will be fully open-source and free of charge, however i'm also thinking of ways to fund the development of new features
to PDT Core / PDT-Extensions or any other related plugin. My main ideas are:

- Go down the crowd-funding route, for example like py-dev has been doing: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pydev-and-liclipse-for-a-fast-sexy-and-dark-eclipse
- Find sponsors for new features, similar to what travis-ci does: https://travis-ci.org/


Any feedback greatly appreciated.



regards

-robert




Jacek Pospychała

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May 15, 2013, 5:07:21 AM5/15/13
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hi Robert,
it's a great initiative and I'd love to see you succeed!
If there's anything specific from PDT side that you're missing please
don't hesitate to bug me about it. I'll do anything I can.

From Eclipse Foundation side of things, I always wanted to see Eclipse
PHP package listed on http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. IMHO it has
great visibility, downloads rates for some packages are just enormous
(e.g. magnitude higher than top marketplace packages) and it's sad
that there's no package for PHP devs. Now that you're looking into
packaging, have you considered the EPP initiative? It has it's own
constraints, but maybe would be interesting to you.

Jacek
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Robert Gründler

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May 15, 2013, 5:20:42 AM5/15/13
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On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jacek Pospychała <jacek.po...@gmail.com> wrote:
it's a great initiative and I'd love to see you succeed!
If there's anything specific from PDT side that you're missing please
don't hesitate to bug me about it. I'll do anything I can.

thanks. so far i didn't run into any major issues.


From Eclipse Foundation side of things, I always wanted to see Eclipse
PHP package listed on http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. IMHO it has
great visibility, downloads rates for some packages are just enormous
(e.g. magnitude higher than top marketplace packages) and it's sad
that there's no package for PHP devs.

yep, it would be the goal to show up there. As Mike mentioned, there has been a package
available, but it has been removed a couple of years ago. As far as i remember the maintainer
said it would be too much work to keep maintaining it.

From what i've seen playing around with my existing  tycho build, it shouldn't be that much work to maintain it though.

 
Now that you're looking into
packaging, have you considered the EPP initiative? It has it's own
constraints, but maybe would be interesting to you.

Nope, thanks for the hint.


regards

-robert

Jacek Pospychała

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May 15, 2013, 5:27:17 AM5/15/13
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Great!

here's an outline about getting started with EPP:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EPP/How_to_create_a_package

have a look and think about it!

Robert Gründler

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May 30, 2013, 6:43:31 AM5/30/13
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fyi: I've released the first alpha version of the PHP build: https://github.com/pulse00/lennard-php


I'll try to find some testers for Windows and Linux, as i'm developing on OSX and don't have the resources to fully test
on all platforms.

Any feedback on the featureset of the build would be great.


regard


-robert




On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Mike Milinkovich <mike.mil...@eclipse.org> wrote:

As far as I know, it was discontinued because the company which was funding the work decided that it was not where they wanted to put their resources. I've been hoping ever since that someone from the community would step forward to resurrect it. 

From: Seva Lapsha
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 3:27 PM
To: PDT Developers
Reply To: PDT Developers
Subject: Re: [pdt-dev] Fwd: Providing an All-In-One PDT Eclipse distribution

Yes, I was wondering why it was discontinued...


On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 5:11 AM, Mike Milinkovich <mike.mil...@eclipse.org> wrote:

As a historical note, once upon a time, there was a very successful  PHP package on the download page. It would be great to see one again.  

From: Jacek Pospychała
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11:08 AM
To: PDT Developers
Reply To: PDT Developers
Subject: [pdt-dev] Fwd: Providing an All-In-One PDT Eclipse distribution

meh... I accidentally only sent to pdt-eg mailing list.
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Mike Milinkovich

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May 30, 2013, 9:24:33 AM5/30/13
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Is anyone else getting a 404 on that link?

Robert Gründler

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May 30, 2013, 9:34:07 AM5/30/13
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Hi all,

that's odd. I've actually made the repository public before writing the email, and it suddenly was private again...


Anyway, it's public now again, i've tested it while being logged out from github: https://github.com/pulse00/lennard-php


regards


-robert






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Kaloyan Raev

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Jun 3, 2013, 9:48:01 AM6/3/13
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Hi Robert,

Having an Eclipse-based PHP all-in-one package is a really nice initiative. However, I agree with Jacek, that if it is an Eclipse.org EPP package, it would have greater chance to be adopted by users. The Eclipse.org download page is a really famous one.

Of course, EPP packages are restricted to include only software components developer under Eclipse Foundation, which can be a limitation for the extensions developed outside of Eclipse Foundation. However, this can be easily worked around if all these extensions are registered on the Eclipse Marketplace and the PHP EPP package makes them easily discoverable and promote them to users. If these extensions are open source, then another option (but for the longer term) would be to move them to Eclipse Foundation.

What do you think about this?

BTW, I successfully downloaded and installed your package on my Ubuntu 13.04. It starts successfully, but suffers from some of the well-known crashes under Linux when working with the Welcome screen. However, this is not a specific issues for your package, but a generic one for Eclipse under Linux. What I miss the most, is how to get started after installation. The welcome screen is still not well-developed and does not give enough guidance.

Greetings,
Kaloyan
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