equinox |
Plans | |
Equinox planning is a community effort. Anyone proposing a work item should consider the following points:
Basically nothing will get done unless people are volunteering to do it. The following are the general workitems which are underway in Equinox. |
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Dynamic plug-ins | |
Currently plug-ins cannot be added, removed or updated while the platform is running. In addition to being annoying for users (they have to exit and restart the platform to complete any install/update actions), it prevents Eclipse from handling several end-user scenarios. For example, consider what happens when a user browsing the web encounters a new resource type that their browser does not understand. The browser discovers the appropriate plug-in, downloads and installs it and then uses it to present/run/manage the content. This is all possible in Eclipse but the user would have to cycle the platform after installing the plugin. The challenges in this area general relate to managing the plugin registry. As plugins are added and removed, pre-existing plugins might be enabled or disabled due to changes in presence or version of a prerequisite. Extensions and extension-points may be added or removed and so need to be relinked and reprocessed by plugins. This work item can be subdivided as follows:
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Runtime Alternatives | |
Eclipse currently uses a home-grown runtime model. That is, the runtime model/mechanism was designed and implemented specifically for Eclipse. This is good in that it has been highly optimized and tailor. This is less than optimal in that there are many issues which are complicated and having a unique runtime mechanism does not allow us to reuse the work done in other areas (e.g., OSGi, Avalon, JMX, ...). Further, this approach makes it hard for users in those other environments to use Eclipse as there are model contentions. One of the goals of Equinox is to look at alternate runtime models and investigate their use as a base runtime for Eclipse. This is a tall order. The good news is that even if we fail to get full integration, we will no doubt learn a great deal and understand techniques for partial integration. More details can be found here
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Service model | |
to be added... |