How to discover an Eclipse installation remotely

[Robin Sharma]

Hi guys!

Is there a Java-only solution to this. I want to find out whether a remote machine has Eclipse installed on it or not, on an intranet of course.

Thanks.

[Paul Sturrock]

You'll need access to the remote machine's file system, which is a OS thing, nothing to do with Java. Then all you can do is trawl the entire drive to see if you find eclipse.exe. Of course that file may exist and eclipse may not exist in a working form (other files could be missing, there might be no JDK on the machine etc.). Or the user might has renamed it. Sounds like a difficult requirement to fulfill.

[Robin Sharma]

Originally posted by Paul Sturrock:
You'll need access to the remote machine's file system, which is a OS thing, nothing to do with Java. Then all you can do is trawl the entire drive to see if you find eclipse.exe. Of course that file may exist and eclipse may not exist in a working form (other files could be missing, there might be no JDK on the machine etc.). Or the user might has renamed it. Sounds like a difficult requirement to fulfill.

Hi Paul!

I know it is a tough cookie. Even querying the registry(Windows) won't help, as Eclipse doesn't make any such entries. But it is a requirement. Can't help it :-(

Also, is there a way to know that Eclipse is *running* on a remote m/c. Does it, like, listen on some standard port etc.

[Paul Sturrock]

No, but it does use the lock file approach to prevent multiple eclipse instances running on the one machine. There will be a file in the workspace called lock which eclipse holds onto while it is running. If you can find that an can't update it you can assume eclipse is running. However, that file could be anywhere on the user's machine. You have no way to distiunguish eclipse's lock file from any other application that also uses a lock file.

That aside, this is going to iritate users. I would not be happy if a remote process periodically scanned my entire drive. Personally, if I were presented with this requirement, I'd explain to whoever asked for it why it is not possible. Even professional discovery tools (e.g. Centennial) are going to struggle to do this.
[ August 25, 2006: Message edited by: Paul Sturrock ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

If it's an intranet, maybe the "is Eclipse installed?" part could be handled by having a standard install location, and the "is Eclipse active?" part could be handled by a trivial plugin which did listen on a well-known port, and a requirement that intranet users install this plugin.