Today’s presentation: Discovering the p2 APIs

As the use of p2 grows, an understanding of the proper use of the p2 APIs is essential. In a session at EclipseCon 2011, Sonatype’s Pascal Rapicault provided an introduction to the p2 APIs including the first official API 3.6, as well as discussed their intended uses.

Pascal leads the Equinox p2 team, dedicated to provide a cross platform provisioning technology at Eclipse. Over his years of involvement at Eclipse, Pascal has shaped the Eclipse component story by contributing to the runtime, build and provisioning aspects, thus defining how components are designed, developed, built, deployed and finally executed. Pascal holds an engineering degree from ESSI (now Polytech’ Sophia) and a PhD from the University of Nice.

Through examples, this session covered the high level APIs provided in the UI and Operations, as well as some of the more core APIs.

View the presentation below (in two parts) or on our YouTube channel:

Part 2:

The meetup will take place on Wednesday June 16, in Guelph Ontario.  The day will begin with presentations for world-class developers, covering topics such as Maven, m2eclipse, API Tooling, and p2.

Following dinner, we will be hosting an Eclipse DemoCamp, where members of the local tech community will take the stage and present their latest projects.

This is a free event, but seating is limited, so to reserve your spot in the audience or as a DemoCamp participant, register today.

For more information about the Guelph Meetup location, refer to the map below, or click here.

View Sonatype’s Maven Meetup – Guelph in a larger map

Configuration Backup Task

This task allows you to schedule or trigger on-demand backups of all the Nexus configuration xml files. This scheduled task will create a zip archive of configuration files and preserve a configurable number of historical backups. In 1.4, this task will be hooked up to the configuration so that and changes can be automatically backed up and optionally committed to source control.

Maven Settings Templates

This plugin allows authorized Nexus users to define and update Maven settings.xml templates for their users. Multiple Templates can be created for use in different teams if you need. The default suggested settings shown in the Nexus book is also provided out of the box. There are several properties that can be automatically interpolated for the user, including the baseUrl, and userId. This release also comes with a Maven plugin that lets the user grab and update their settings with a single execution. With this combined functionality, it becomes even easier to synchronize any settings changes across your entire team. It will also make it easy to update CI settings remotely if you configure a “build” in your CI to execute and update the plugin.

Nexus Maven Plugin for Controlling Staging from the Command Line

This plugin integrates with the staging plugin in Nexus and allows you to close, drop and promote staging repositories right from the command line, or as part of a build. The nexus-maven-plugin that implements the Maven side of the settings update as well as the Staging control is open source, since it serves as a good example of how to leverage the Nexus REST API for automation.

Improved Artifact Upload Interface

Nexus 1.3.2 has a much improved artifact upload interface which allows a Nexus user to deploy multiple artifacts to Nexus at once. This streamlined interface also allows for more control over the source of GAV information during an artifact upload.

Ability to Upload a Staged Deployment in the Nexus UI

Prior to Nexus 1.3.2, the only way to activate staging was to run a deployment against a Nexus repository manager using Maven. In 1.3.2, a user can trigger a staging profile by uploading a staged deployment using the Staging Upload feature.

Eclipse P2 / Update Site aggregation

Nexus Pro 1.3 already supported P2 proxying, but this feature goes a step further. It allows you to also proxy an older update site format and aggregate it into a single P2 repository. This means it’s now possible to have all your developers add a single P2 url to their Eclipse 3.4+ IDE and grab all the updates needed. This functionality is parallel to the maven repository group functionality, where the Nexus administrators control the repositories and centralize the configuration in one place.

Download a Free Nexus Pro Evaluation

To try out these features and more, Download a Free Evaluation of Nexus Pro 1.3.2, and read the free, online Neuxs Book Repository Management with Nexus.