Running Eclipse on the Server-side

Simon Kaegi

Abstract

Increasingly, developers are thinking about how they might use Eclipse's powerful component model and extension mechanisms in server-side environments. The possibility of a shared runtime that allows the re-use of components between client and server motivates some. Others see great promise in being able to safely modify the components and configuration of software running in a live server environment.

Running Eclipse on the server takes a different mindset as it questions some of the design and implementation assumptions made and adds a number of additional constraints on Eclipse's running environment. For example, in a server-side environment:

You can make few assumptions on the control of global resources
Your lifecycle is controlled externally
You might be running for a very long time
You're expected to integrate in a compliant fashion with other server elements

The key goal of my research has been to bring existing work together to make exploration practical. The intent is to help foster solutions to the issues relating to integrating Eclipse with server-side technology. In this presentation I'll show the state of this research and an example of a servlet based application built on this platform.