Bug 312325

Description Dave Orme 2010-05-10 15:44:32 EDT

E4 addresses two long-standing complaints by RCP developers: 

1) That RCP is too hard to understand and has too many APIs.  One subpart of this concern is that RCP does not come with "batteries included" for creating enterprise RCP applications.

2) That in a world of desktop/cloud mashups, RCP remains purely a desktop-centric framework.

This contribution seeks to further these two concerns using two libraries that are built on top of existing Eclipse APIs:

1) The Enterprise Installer: Enterprise network-centric applications normally install as a small kernel, and then add features and/or update themselves automatically over the wire.  While Eclipse's update manager and P2 APIs can be made to support these use-cases, additional work is required by the developer.  The out-of-box experience is anything but "batteries included".  The Enterprise Installer supplies simple APIs and examples, making it a snap to create this kind of self-updated application.

2) The essence of the World Wide Web is the hyperlink.  Hyperlinks let us share Google search results, our personal page on Facebook, or invoke a bit of functionality in Twitter's REST API.  Deep Linking is (a) a small DSL built on top of HTTP hyperlinks, enabling literally any part of an RCP application to become URL-addressable, and (b) a set of OSGI bundles (i) exposing all Eclipse perspectives as URLs, and (ii) adding an extension point that can be used to write an arbitrary callback that is URL-addressable.

In addition, we supply a small OSGI application that (a) can be registered on the native platform as a URL protocol handler, and (b) proxies requests made to this native deeplink protocol through to the actual HTTP server that will handle the request.  This proxy also makes sure that the actual client application that can handle a particular deep link request is running and will automatically start it if it is not.


This bug report serves to track discussion about this code contribution and as the link to the IPZilla request.