[p2-dev] Public API, recommendations

["Laidlaw, Don" <don.laidlaw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Public API, recommendations

Hi Guys,

I have been following the p2 work closely for a while, and playing with it, and have a nice working scenario. So far I have discovered the internal workings by looking at the code for the installer and director application bundles. It is very informative, and has enabled me to write my own client that basically mirrors what the director app does to create a new eclipse install. 

But I am not installing eclipse, I am actually installing equinox-based OSGi server containers. These containers run our server code, and have no UI components whatsoever. Most the of communications with external processes are done using JMS using ActiveMQ.

We need to install one or more of these containers on each server in a distributed server farm. To do this we were planning on writing one “agent” to install on each server, then from a central provisioning console ask the agent to create a new container and start it. The agent would handle the initial provisioning and startup of our containers. This is working great at the moment :)

The questions I have are around the p2 API. I know there is no public API right now, and we are using the internal provisional calls. I understand the API is a moving target. Any ideas on when (in a general sense) the API will become public? Or do you recommend that for now we should not use the API at all, but instead have our “agent” construct commands using the director application to do our provisioning?

Thanks for your feedback. 


Best Regards,

Don Laidlaw | Sr. Research Engineer | Infor | office: 902-576-5185 | mobile: 902-401-6771 | don.laidlaw@xxxxxxxxx