Did you check your Pulse ?

If you are using Eclipse, then you must check out Pulse. Irrespective of if one is a Developer, Technical Lead or an IT manager, Pulse has some thing to offer. Pulse is free software created by Genuitec LLC, which focuses to decrease some of the pain points and ease the eclipse profile maintenance.

I have been playing with Pulse in past few weeks and it certainly does what it claims to be. Following is a typical scenario that i have been using eclipse from past 5 years. Its very interesting to analyse them and see how Pulse helps me in improving the same tasks that i very often.

Scenario #1 : For users who are familiar with the Eclipse Platform, they simply need to download the installation and run it. As we need and install more plugins, it often becomes little difficult to maintain the dependencies. Eclipse instance that i typically run follows a sequence of steps…

• Find the plugin “MyPlugin”
• Find the Dependencies of the plugin “MyPlugin”
• Depending on the download size, find a nearest mirror site
• Download the dependencies and the actual plugin “MyPlugin”

With Pulse : Pulse enables me to overcome all the above mentioned steps. Of course i need to still know which plugin i want to install :). Once i find a plugin, looking for Dependencies, Looking for faster download mirror site and downloading tasks are done by Pulse for me. I wanted to use WTP XML editor, and i got this option from Pulse default profiles. Its very cool that all the dependant plugins are automatically added by Pulse and downloaded concurrently. Yes you read it right. See the following screen-shot which shows you the PHP editor download.

Scenario #2 : So far so good, I have installed my favorite plugin and successfully ran my eclipse instance. Its very customary for many of us to have many instances of Eclipse installations. They could either be for work or for playing a new cool set of features from a latest release of eclipse. At any point of time i normally have minimum of 4 instances namely WTP All in One (my sandbox), Project Specific Eclipse, CDT Eclipse and TopCased Eclipse. Of course i do want to maintain different instances and don’t want to install one on the top of other. In this scenario, i am increasing my disk space by having multiple installations.

With Pulse : Pulse manages all your profiles that you have created. Pulse knows all the plugins that have been downloaded and manages a single copy of the plugins, and supplies to different profiles. So, you would save your disk space by default. This would be a significant save for many of us and especially IT Department. They do care about the hard-drives provided to developers ;). e.g. if CVS plugin is already downloaded, it will be shared across multiple profiles that you have.

Scenario #3 : And now, once i have successfully downloaded and installed plugins, i am interested to see the SAME configuration on my team’s machines. Hummm… Till now i used to send the download sites of all the plugins to my team and they download again. Or, i copy the entire eclipse installation on to Memory Card :). 

With Pulse : Pulse lets you to create your own profile and share it to other users. Of course you need to register on Pulse to be able to share profiles, but that’s nothing compared to what you gain. That means, a profile shared by my colleague is seen by me and i can start using this profile right away by running this. In-fact the same profile can be seen worldwide and can be accessed by any one who knows about this profile. 

Scenario #4 : I worked for Bosch, an automotive supplier and the IT department had no way to distribute a single instance of Eclipse that has a good set of plugins. If IT developers find few good plugins and want to have them with all colleagues, there is no single way to do this. This usually ends up in having different Eclipse and plugins combination.

With Pulse : As Profiles can be shared, any user can send this profile and the same can be accessed by all colleagues. IT Department can distribute these profiles so that developers can run the profiles they are interested in.

Overall its a great tool. One interesting thing i like is, any registered user can submit a plugin of his choice to be included in Pulse’s profile. I guess currently this is in the beta stage and i am hoping to see lot more features in future. More information can be obtained at following pulse links…

Download Pluse : http://www.poweredbypulse.com/download.html       

Pulse Features / Why use Pulse : http://www.poweredbypulse.com/why.html 

Support and Forums : http://www.poweredbypulse.com/support.html