Build and Provision: Two Sides of the Coin We Love to Hate

Talk by Ed Merks, Eclipse Modeling Framework Lead.

Componentized software is produced by combining and assembling the output of separate development projects into a provisioned system or application. Construction of an efficient build-assemble-provision pipeline, while essential to the overall success of the development process, is typically neglected in favor of "real" development and is generally a thankless task for whoever tackles it. We're left with arcane systems glued together from Ant scripts and other "black arts", builds that fail for inexplicable reasons at the worst times, and arbitrary separation between how software is "built" and how it is "provisioned". Awareness of this problem has grown with each annual Eclipse release, and a number of new Eclipse technologies, from emerging to maturing, are now available to help. These technologies have been used to streamline Eclipse's coordinated release process, and are available to the committer community to address the needs within individual projects.

This talk will survey the landscape of build and provisioning technologies at Eclipse, explaining how overlapping technologies are being rationalized and harmonized, particularly in relation to p2. A key point will be to show how traditional "build" and "provisioning" concerns are actually just two aspects of a single development process. This talk will also demonstrate how modeling technology can be used to describe the artifacts entering the pipeline and the steps required to transform them into the final provisioned system. The goal will be to show how a declarative, high-level description can be used to make the build-assemble-provision pipeline transparent, repeatable and flexible.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Day_At_Googleplex_2009

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Nonprofits & Activism

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• EclipseDay2009