How to handle Eclipse in a multiuser environment (500+) ?

Question

How would you go about handling Eclipse in a multiuser and multisite environment with, say, 500 or more developers?

Having each one downloading their own installation would lead to a support and maintenance nightmare. Forcing each one to use a central installation doesnt feel ideal either and would limit the users option to download plugins.

Edit: the question is not about forcing user to choose Eclipse, the premise of the question is that there are 500+ users who want to use it as their IDE.

If this many user are to handle their own installations, there will be alot of time wasted just downloading Eclipse and installing it with some required plugins. Say it takes half a day for each user, multiply that by 500 or more and that means alot of wasted time/money.

Answer 1

Organize your project around Maven or Ant+Ivy and stop caring about which IDE your developers use.

Answer 2

I would use ant for compiling, building, generating Javadoc and checking code clarity.

If you have got more than 500 developers everyone should go agains a repository, be it CSV or VSN using a client appropiate to their client machine.

Dont even think about demmanding Eclipse as development environment, some people may prefer netbeans, notepad++ or whatever and you may have a hard time demmanding a common IDE.

Make them download files with rules to prevent uploading of bad files (eclipse project dependent files for example).

Regards.

Answer 3

There are ways to install Eclipse in a shared environment so that plugins come from one place and are locked down, but the workspace/prefs are per-user. I've never done it, so check the documentation for more details.

But I would say that letting people be in charge of their own IDE destiny is a good way to go, and the judge them on the code the write/commit rather than forcing them to work with a particular IDE, etc.

At my work, we have people who use Eclipse and IDEA and Emacs(!!!) on the same project without any problems. Some people use Eclipse 3.5, some use Eclipse 3.6, there are several different versions of IDEA. We just let people sort out their own IDEs - as long as they're writing good code.

Answer 4

The best solution will be Yoxos Ondemand Eclipse + Maven

Yoxos has capabilities of creating templates of IDEs which you can distribute or update.

In some of the big java shops, they create their own edition of Eclipse (add plugins, tweaks etc), make it available on the local intranet and ask to run a bat/sh script to install: 1. Sun JDK, 2. Eclipse, 3. Source code control etc

If you don't want to handle all that, then the best option would be Yoxos.