The Power to Make Informed Decisions
- How do you choose open source components?
- Can you identify security and licensing issues early in the development process?
- How do you know when to upgrade to a new version of an open source component?
Choose the right components directly from the Eclipse IDE. You’ll get the information you need when you need it to improve quality and avoid finding problems later in the process when fixes are costly and time consuming.
Development Insight for Eclipse lets you:
- See the information you need to decide whether or not to upgrade components.
- Understand which versions of each component are used in your project.
- Update a component to a new version throughout your project
- Identify where a specific component is used
- Choose components that meet your security quality, security and licensing standards.
- Identify components with newly discovered vulnerabilities.
The Dependency Hub View
See all updated versions of each component so that you can easily evaluate when to upgrade.
The picture below shows the "Dependency hub" view. It is divided into two sections, an overview on the left, and a details section on the right. The overview presents a list of all the libraries used by the projects contained in the workspace, whereas the details provide a list of the available versions. Libraries that are brought in transitively are shown in a light grey.
Having shown with a "red X" overlay means that the artifact could not be identified. For Apache Maven projects, the identification process will query the repositories associated with the Maven project, whereas for other projects, it will only query Maven Central.
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Upgrading a Library to a New Version
For Maven projects only, the dependency plug-in allows to easily update a library to a new version. To perform this operation, select the desired version in the details section and hit the "Mark for upgrade" button. Repeat this operation for all the desired libraries, then hit the "commit changes" button. Hitting the "commit changes" button will bring up the Eclipse refactoring wizard that will present the edits made to the files.
The upgrade facility supports usage of properties, introduction of management section, and changes to the version section of the dependency. Note that when the operation is complete, the view will only be updated one the build is complete.
Finding References to a Library
In order to help locate why a library is used, it suffices to right click on a dependency in the overview section of the view and select "locate declarations" or use the button in the view toolbar. This will cause the results to be revealed in the Eclipse Search view (see picture below). For Maven projects, the user will have the possibility to directly jump to the relevant declaration in the pom.xml. For Java projects the Java Build path dialog is shown, and for PDE the Manifest.mf will be opened.
