Effectively Managing Workshop Extensions

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Chris Hogue's Blog | February 14, 2007   8:50 AM | Comments (0)

It's no secret that one of the benefits of using Eclipse is what it provides in extensibility. But there are good ways and bad ways to manage that extensibility.

Now that the Eclipse-based Workshop has been out for a while it's become clear that people don't just stick with the Workshop plug-ins we give them (not that this is at all surprising). They add all sorts of third-party plug-ins from SCM plugins, Spring plugins, to all sorts of plugins for products I've never heard of :)

While Eclipse does allow you to just drop all those plug-ins in the main eclipse directory, doing so will make it harder to manage, particularly when you want to move to a newer or different version of Eclipse (or Workshop) itself. You'll have to physically move all the plugins over with it.

A better way to manage your extensions is to use Eclipse's extension location mechanism. This is a very simple mechanism that allows you to put your third-party plugins in a separate directory and link to them from the main Eclipse install. This way when you want to drop in a new Eclipse, you don't have to move all the other plugins. Just link the new Eclipse to the existing extension locations.

To manage the list of extension locations go to the Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration page. If you do this with Workshop you'll see on the screen that pops up a whole list of extension locations. That's because this is exactly how Workshop adds its plugins to the base Eclipse.

But it's not just for BEA plugins. You can add your own extension locations to this list. In fact this is generally the recommended way of adding plug-ins.

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