PDT/Composer Migration

This page describes steps, requirements and ideas to migrate the Composer Eclipse Plugin into PDT.

Requirements

Requirements are things to sort out prior to migrating code from the plugin into PDT, mostly dependencies.

JSON Editor

There is a JSON Editor coming to WTP, which can be used for this. Pending pull request [1]

UI-Toolkit

gossi extracted some UI-Widgets and helpers into eclipse-components which are about to contribute back to PDT. Refer to the mailing list discussion (question - answer).

A short evaluation on these three options:

• Scout: Seems more like some kind of web technology
• EFF: Might be a place to contribute parts of eclipse-components to
• Saphire: Interessting and different approach, looks like the most promising one.

CLI-Tools

Get in contact with the Nodeclipse (?) authors and/or those that contributed the WTP JSON Editor. Running CLI Tools from inside eclipse is a common interesst.

Ideas

Finish original Issues

Instead of just migrating existing functionality, there are a couple of issues waiting, that should be finished during the migration, here is a list:

• ... todo

API Considerations

What we want and need to provide, e.g. through extension points ?

• Expose package type to eclipse
• Composer-Editor additions (e.g. new pages - optionally only activated on a specific package type)

Issues

UI/Usability Issues

Composer-Plugin comes with two project wizards itself. They both should be aligned and rethought with the existing PDT project creation wizards in order to deliver a consistent experience. AND: Some of the composer wizards have a ambigous name, it is not completely clear what they mean. [2]

IP related Issues

• Composer-Java-Bidings: gossi wrote most of it, Robert Gründler and David Pakula send in contributions.
• JSON Simple isn't part of orbit, migration to GSON in pull request [3]
• HTTPTools Core and NIO are never than orbit, new versions should be added.
• Composer plugin use launch utilities from PEX. They should be moved to PDT or written from scratch.

References

• PDT and Composer: A Visionary Concept