Context

Consider the steps involved in setting up a fresh Eclipse development environment to work with the source code of a particular version of a specific project:

• Install a project-specific IDE with appropriate tooling, i.e., an IDE configured with all the settings and tools needed for editing, compiling, debugging, and testing the project's artifacts.
• Materialize the workspace with the project's bundles and features by importing their workspace projects from various source code repositories, organizing those workspace projects into meaningful working sets.
• Materialize the target platform to contain all the bundles and features needed to compile the project's source code, run the project's tests, and exercise the project's end-user functionality.

• Who writes and maintains these instructions?
• How do contributors find these instructions for each specific project?
• How many contributors must follow these instructions, how often, and with how much invested time?

In addition to the project-specific setup process, each user typically has her own personal favorite tools she wants installed as well as has her own personal preferences, such as key bindings, she wants uniformly applied to each installation and workspace. With Oomph Setup, this too is formalized and automated.

The process of setting up a development environment involves two phases. The first, or bootstrap phase, involves installing a functional product on disk. Using the traditional manual approach one achieves this goal by as follows:

• Download a product, i.e., a package, from Eclipse's download page.
• Unzip that download to the desired location on disk using an unzip tool that can handle Eclipse's zip files.
• Ensure that a bit-appropriate JRE version is installed and visible on the execution path.
• Run the executable.

The second phase involves activities performed in the running product itself:

• Install additional tools not included in the downloaded product.
• Configure various preferences appropriately, ideally by importing those preferences from a carefully-crafted Eclipse preference file.
• Import workspace projects, ideally by importing those projects from a carefully-crafted project set file.
• Activate the required target platform, ideally by activating a carefully-crafted target platform description file.

To automate this setup process, Oomph provides the following:

• An installer wizard that automates the both phases of setting up a development environment.
• A project wizard that automates the second phase of setting up a development environment.
• An execution wizard that automates updating the development environment, including the provisioning of personal favorite tools and personal preferences.

To understand how best to exploit Oomph in order to save time and spare aggravation, some basic concepts need to be well understood. Automation is achieved by specifying setup tasks organized into scopes stored in resources.

An important footnote is that Oomph makes heavy use of bundle pooling so it highly disk-space efficient to install many products and provision many target platforms because they can all share a common bundle pool such that for each installable unit, there is only on jar file on disk. Not only is this space efficient, it also dramatically improves installation and provisioning performance because once an installable unit is in the pool, it never again needs to be downloaded from the Internet.

This document provides a general overview of the concepts that underly Oomph's Setup model: Context