Nexus Pro: Support for Eclipse P2 Repositories

April 14, 2009 By Jason van Zyl

2 minute read time

At Sonatype we're starting to release some of the P2 related support we're developing. The release of Nexus 1.3.2 has the basis for all our future P2 work. We see [Nexus Pro][nxcm] helping OSGi users to provision their systems whether that be a developer desktops or server side instances. We will be making provisions (pun intended) to support some very sophisticate server side provisioning, but in the Nexus 1.3.2 release we are focusing squarely on helping organizations manage their Eclipse installations for their developers.

[nxcm]: http://www.sonatype.com/nexus

Nexus Professional has support for Eclipse P2 repositories, and it can serve Eclipse plugin artifacts to tools that know how to interact with the Eclipse P2 repository format including Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede. If you use the Eclipse IDE, you probably have a set of plugins which every single developer needs to install to get productive. Using Nexus Professional, you can combine multiple Eclipse update sites into a single URL which your developers can use when they are configuring a development environment. Using Nexus Professional as a single point-of-access between your developers and the Eclipse update sites they depend on allows you to manage and define a set of common Eclipse plugins in your organization's Eclipse development environment.

You can now easily manage all your 3rd party artifacts whether they be JARs, OSGi bundles, or Eclipse plugins. Not only managing how these artifacts are consumed, but how they are exposed within your organization, tracking how they were acquired, and helping produce the necessary bill of materials at the end of the development cycle. We're pretty excited about the features we're developing in Nexus!

You can watch a screencast of our P2 support here:


Provisioning Eclipse with Nexus Pro from Sonatype on Vimeo.

[nxcmp2]: http://vimeo.com/4102464
[hudson]: https://hudson.dev.java.net
[inst]: http://www.instantiations.com/
[kohsuke]: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kohsuke/
[m2e]: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org
[mark]: http://www.sonatype.com/people/author/mark/
[maven]: http://maven.apache.org
[nexus]: http://nexus.sonatype.org
[nxcm]: http://www.sonatype.com/nexus
[sat4j]: http://www.sat4j.org/
[sonatype]: http://www.sonatype.com
[webtide]: http://www.webtide.com
[wt]: http://www.instantiations.com/windowtester/index.html

Tags: Nexus Repo Reel, Sonatype Says, Everything Open Source

Written by Jason van Zyl

Jason is a co-founder and the former CTO of Sonatype.