Difference between revisions of "PDE/Ideas"

Revision as of 14:37, 7 June 2010

Introduction

This page contains blue sky thinking about the kind of things we would like to see in PDE's future. This is a place to collect ideas - it does not represent a commitment to implement the ideas.

Target Management

• Make the p2/metadata/profile information seamlessly integrate with target definitions, consider having targets where every plug-in has metadata (from repository, from installation, generated for a directory). Provide the metadata to the launcher.
• Use the metadata stored in targets to simplify launching. Target launching should leverage Framework Admin, rather than hand-crafting a command line. This way, launching a target platform would be the same as running the executable in the file system.
• Have the target definition models to interact with the PDE states directly rather than working through preference settings (this a required step to get to per-project target platforms).

Building

• Workspace based building. Currently, the build process is Ant based and does not leverage workspace builders or project specific settings. As the number of builders/settings grows a workspace based build would allow for simpler integration and better report generation with the build process. A challenge here is around bootstrapping a pure source build scenario.
• Parallel compilation in headless build

File Manipulation

• There have been several requests for APIs to manipulate bundle definition files - MANIFEST.MF, plugin.xml, and build.properties.
• Provide ASTs for PDE documents: would make document creation / editing trivial. Would be nice to have something like this backing the PDE editors...