For the last couple of jetty @ eclipse releases I have been working with getting a bit more used to the eclipse way of doing things. One of those ‘eclipse way’ deals is the p2 update site and I am announcing here the availability of a certain subset of jetty features that are available for download from within eclipse. What does this actually mean?
Well, I am also working on an eclipse plugin or two that ultimately would make use of these features so I went through the process of figuring out this deployment mechanism. I also worked on a updating the osgi HttpService for use with the jetty7 artifacts as well so that was another use I had for it. But ultimately, part of joining eclipse was to bring the jetty components to a larger audience and these update sites seem to be one of the major deployment mechanisms for software within eclipse. Pulling from this update site will not given the average user a new deployment mechanism for their webapp development, that is one of the plugins I have knocking around on the machine which I’ll try to get out pretty soon. What this will give you is either the jetty server, the asynchronous jetty-client, or the jetty servlet components built on top of the jetty server feature. These are functionally repackaged artifacts from the maven repository where we have traditionally deployed our artifacts, renamed into the more eclipse conventional naming and masked into ‘features’. I am very interested in getting feedback on this and I would like to engage directly with developers that make use of these artifacts to both make sure that the update site itself is of the right format (and working against the correct target platform, ouch what a pain that was) and then also to make sure that the feature breakdown makes sense. If this preliminary setup works then I’ll run with it and get the rest of the jetty artifacts we ship (JMX, JNDI, etc etc) into separate features and get them deployed up to the update site.
Anyway, the update site for the last 7.0.0.M2 release is located at:
http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/stable-7/update/
Anyway, feel free to email me feedback directly to ‘jesse DOT mcconnell AT gmail.com’ or you can leave feedback as a comment on this blog, your choice. Your feedback is welcome and will help us get this right for the eclipse developer community.