Can Pulse provision software that is not an Eclipse plugin?

We get many support questions regarding deploying and sharing artifacts that are not Eclipse plugins, i.e. other JARs or even executable binaries. The short answer is that Pulse can do this to a certain extent using the Community Edition or Freelance Team Edition and absolutely possible with Private Label and some elbow grease.

Pulse, officially, is a provisioning system built using Eclipse. It can used as a software development tool as seen in the Community Edition. It will allow you to easily set up a profile that is shared with all memebers of the development team. Pulse will even allow you to share Eclipse preferences and team project sets so that your developers can have all the code they need to be productive. To use a shared profile all team members would need to purchase Pulse Freelance Team Edition. A free 30 day trial is automatically started to let you see how powerful sharing and collaboration can be. There is also a version called Private Label that will give you complete control of the software catalog and deplyment options. More on Private Label later.

Pulse Community Edition does updates by request of the user. That is, you cannot force a user, or team member, to upgrade to a new version of software. They all need to "Check for Updates" using the Pulse Explorer (the tool used to manage all profiles for a user) or the Software and Workspace Center (the tool found in a running profile used to manage that single profile). Pulse Private Label would allow you to change this policy to whatever you want it to be. You could always force updates or download in the background and then force on next restart of the profile. Even never allow updates; whatever you want the policy to be.

Pulse can manage common libraries if you put those libraries into an update site that exists somewhere where all team members can access it, i.e. a public website or one behind a corporate firewall. It is just a matter of defining the update site and then including it with the profile. You can even use this for internal eclipse plugins as Pulse does not store the bits on our servers. We only store some meta information about the update site if we can access it.

Pulse can also be used to distribute non-jar based artifacts. In fact we currently have JREs available from the catalog. For certain tools like Tomcat or Apache, you would really need to have some custom work done that would handle the installation of it. This can be done using Pulse Private Label. Private Label gives you complete control of the catalog and how your profiles get distributed. You can host the servers locally or we can host them. You can define installers, custom catalog pages, even never use the Pulse Explorer at all and just give every developer an installer to use.

If you are interested in more information about Pulse Private Label or even Pulse Freelance Team Edition feel free to contact us at pulse (at) genuitec (dot) com