During this Easter holidays I was hoping to get some time to work on my project, just a little… no abuse. Therefore I made a copy of my files from my workstation to my laptop. But then I started working in my not-so-bleeding-edge-but-adorable powerbook G4 12″ and it felt sooo slow…
Compiling such a big C++ project is not a friendly task, specially while Eclipse is eating almost all of your main memory. Once the compilation is done, I need to do some testing, but even for small runs, my laptop isn’t powerful enough for an execution-driven computer architecture simulator. That was obvious, I already planned to connect via ssh to my workstation to do the testing and to a cluster of computers to do some more serious testing.
What if I could do all these things in a much more simple way. I had an idea rounding my head, which someone must already have implemented: I work locally in my powerbook, changes are updated to my workstation and then compilation/testing is done via ssh: tada!
The little sysadmin in my brain told me a couple of rsync scripts should make the deal. But given there are so many big brains in the eclipse development team I was hoping there was a solution already integrated into the IDE. My search began with this old document which represents *exactly* what I want: Eclipse Remote Development
This is only a recommendations and guidelines document btw, but it’s old… There must be some work done. And it does: RSE and TM are their names. TM and RSE FAQ
RSE allows you to access some *remote* resources from your workbench, as well as managing ssh sessions. You can even create a remote project. But let’s have something clear: remote=slow, local=fast. And I want fast! I want a local project synchronised with a remote one to compile and execute remotely.
Besides, the RSE approach disables C++ indexing and the outline because there is no local project. Not what I wanted. As far as I understood TM is aimed to deploy on embedded systems and there are some incompatibilities with CDT right now… but I got it a bit blurry. So you better look somewhere else for more information. I think RSE/TM is close to what I need but since compilation is made locally you still need a cross-compiler. That’s what I understood from an IBM presentation about RSE.
Conclusion
RSE is a cute piece of software. It’s nice to edit some remote perl scripts, web development and the like, but it’s not a solution for general remote development paradigm with replicated resources. The TM project members in Eclipse (IBM project, I think) are actively working in something promising, everything seems very professional in their development documents, plans, etc. but it’s a bit messy for the end user right now.