Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Eclipse Restart on Update / Install

I really like Eclipse but, something has been bothering me for a while.

- Eclipse is build upon an OSGi framework called Equinox
- OSGi is supposed to support install/remove/restart and version-ing of bundles
- Eclipse plugins are OSGi bundles

So why the heck does Eclipse need to restart after installing new plugins?
Why does it need to restart when updating plugins?

Isn't one of the major points of OSGi to make that unnecessary?
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2 Comments:

At 09 January, 2008 21:36, Blogger Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

Funny that you ask this :)

The reason you have to restart Eclipse is mainly an issue of legacy. The Eclipse Update component was written way before Eclipse actually adopted OSGi. In the past, you were required to restart... with OSGi you really don't have to anymore. That's one part of it. The other part is that making sure all plug-in developers write well behaved OSGi code is tough. It's not easy to write a fully dynamic aware application.

This shouldn't prevent you from using Eclipse to write applications that are fully dynamic. I have written Eclipse RCP applications that use the old Eclipse Update code and don't require a restart. The base RCP code is pretty much dymamic aware from Eclipse, you just have to work your magic with the old Update code :)

On the bright side, in Eclipse 3.4, the old Update component is being replaced by an OSGi-centric provisioning component called p2

 
At 11 February, 2010 15:14, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is it possible to bypass this behavior like through setting some property or the like?

 

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