Skip to main content

Notice: this Wiki will be going read only early in 2024 and edits will no longer be possible. Please see: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/wikis/Wiki-shutdown-plan for the plan.

Jump to: navigation, search

PDE/Ideas

< PDE
Revision as of 16:48, 16 June 2008 by Darin Wright.ca.ibm.com (Talk | contribs) (Building)

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 committment to implement the ideas.

Target Management

  • Enhance target platform provisioning. Leverage p2 to create and configure profiles that can be used as target platforms, and leverage p2 to reflect on the contents of a profile. One could compose a target platform by installing features into a profile from p2 repositories.
  • Simplify and improve the user interface for defining and managing multiple targets in the workspace. Eventually, it would be nice to be able to support more than one target platform in the workspace (i.e. allow different projects to compile against different target platforms). Currently targets can be defined by target files or by the "target platform" user preference. Perhaps a preference page that allowed multiple targets to be defined (like the API Baselines or Installed JREs page) would be more intuitive. Creating/editing a target would open a wizard to modify that specific target, and a check box could be used to specify the "active" workspace target.

Source Management

  • Simiplify the installation of source for debugging and developing against the target platform. For example, a user is debugging something and enters a class for which they have no source. There should be a simple way to install source for the associated bundle.

Building

  • Improve the common self-hosting scenario of exporting a plug-in (bundle) and running with it. It would be nice to be able to build, export, and install a bundle (or set of bundles) into the running SDK with the click of a button (or at least from within one wizard).
  • 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.

Authoring

  • Enhance authoring tools for p2. Traditionally Eclipse has been feature based. Moving forward we need to decide if features still make sense, or if we should encourage the use of installable units. One could imagine tools to author, export/build, and publish installable units and products.

Back to the top