PTP/planning/remote

Remote Development Tools

List of Authors:

   Chris Recoskie (recoskie@ca.ibm.com)
   Greg Watson (grw@us.ibm.com)

Background

This page is for organizing efforts surrounding remote development tools for PTP. Initially this will encompass efforts surrounding a remote development solution that utilizes CDT to provide a suite of remote development tools for C/C++ development. Given that the Photran (Fortran) project is built on top of CDT, we foresee that in the future the remote support we build for CDT could form the basis for remote support for Fortran as well.

Interested Parties

IBM

• Greg Watson (PTP)
• Chris Recoskie (CDT)
• Jason Montojo (CDT)

HP

• Jacob Augustine

Intel

• Leo Treggiari (CDT)

Cril Technology

• Benoit Souyri

ECF Project

• Scott Lewis

Presentations

• Remote Indexing & Searches Presented at the CDT Summit 2006 detailing the need for remote indexing.

• Remote Development Presented at the CDT Summit 2007 detailing the motivation behind the need for remote development tools and the status of current efforts.

Meeting Minutes

Monthly RDT calls are no longer being held. Instead, we are discussing RDT issues during the regular PTP monthly call. Archived meeting minutes from RDT calls can be found below.

RDT conference call, January 11, 2008

RDT conference call, March 14, 2008

RDT conference call, June 13, 2008

RDT conference call, August 22, 2008

Early builds

Early builds of RDT will be available on the PTP 2.1 builds page

Planning

Here are are some areas that are currently being worked on and/or investigated. We welcome contributions in all areas, so if you are interested in a particular area, do not hesitate to offer your input and assistance.

Here is the current state of affairs, as of June, 2008.

• General Remote Services
  • PTP has a preliminary implementation for remote services abstraction. "Remote services" means essentially file operations, as well as launching and control of remote processes.
    • There are several supported implementations of these services, the two most prominent of which are an implementation based on the Remote Systems Explorer (RSE), and a lightweight SSH-only provider that is a part of PTP proper.
  • Greg Watson and Chris Recoskie have designed a service model for remote projects. This model has been implemented in PTP in the org.eclipse.ptp.rdt.services plugin., which allows:
    • The user to configure which services in their system are mapped to which providers and locations.
    • ISVs and tool implementers to define new services, and contribute providers to any defined services.

• EFS Support in CDT [Designs and notes]
  • Chris Recoskie (IBM) has made some changes in CDT 5.0 to allow for one to successfully use CDT to create EFS hosted projects and edit the files. There are some other additional enabling API changes that were made to allow for CModel elements to be tied to EFS URIs.
  • Currently creating an EFS project does not magically allow all parts of CDT to work remotely. Most of CDT is still not EFS aware.

• Remote Indexing for C/C++ (using CDT) [overview]
  • Jason Montojo and Chris Recoskie have have implemented an initial set of C/C++ index based services using RSE's dstore protocol as the communication mechanism. An initial patch has been created and submitted to the PTP Bugzilla and is currently waiting to be committed. Currently implemented features include:
    • A New Remote C/C++ Project wizard that allows you to create remote projects and configure your service model
    • Integrated index lifecycle management
    • Automatic source code delta handling (the index is automatically updated when files in your project are added/removed/changed)
    • Remote Search
    • Remote Call Hierarchy
    • Remote Navigation (e.g. Go To Declaration)
  • Other planned services include:
    • Content Assist
    • Type Hierarchy
    • Include browser
    • Model builder
  • Current Work Items
    • Jason is working on content assist.
    • Mike Kucera is working on remote scanner info support.

• Remote Standard Make (using CDT)
  • Chris Recoskie has started working on a Remote Make Builder and hopes to have a prototype working sometime in the summer of 2008. This builder will use PTP's Remote Services API in order to launch the builder (make) on the remote system.