Bug 74040

Comment 1 Michael Valenta 2004-09-16 16:46:22 EDT

I have posted the following to the WTP newsgroup and mailing list and to the 
eclipse.platform newsgroup.

There have been several discussions lately on various newsgroups and mailing 
lists about the state of FTP/WebDAV support in Eclipse. Currently, this 
support is available as a separate download from the Eclipse Platform SDK 
download page. There has been a recent cleanup and refactoring and the plugins 
involved can now be divided into the following categories (the new structure 
is in HEAD and will start appearing in next weeks integration builds):

1) Simple clients: There are separate plugins that provide simple FTP and 
WebDAV clients with dependencies only on org.eclipse.core.runtime.
2) Site and Target Resource API: There is a target resource API and 
implementations for FTP, WebDAV, java.io.File and IFile.
3) Site Explorer: The site explorer allows the creation of sites to any of the 
above mentioned resource types. Sites can be browsed and resources can be 
copied between sites.
3) IDE Integration: The above 3 feature sets are not tied to the IDE and can 
be used in an RCP application. There is additional funtionality for 
integration into the Team Synchronization view.

I am posting this message to see what interest there is in these plugins. As 
it currently stands, these plugins are maintained by Team as an example of 
integration into the Synchronize view. They are not product quality and there 
is no future work planned to make them so. A bug has been logged against 
Platform WebDAV that proposes moving these plugins to the Web Tools project. 
Here is a link to that bug:

   https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=74040

Of course, the proposed move only makes sense if there are parties in the Web 
Tools community who are willing to contribute to these plugins. If you feel 
that these plugins should be part of the Web Tools project and you are willing 
to contribute to them in some way, please add yourself to the CC list of the 
above mentioned bug and add a comment stating what kind of contribution you 
are willing to make (i.e. code contributions, testing, etc.). The amount of 
interest will gauge the possibility of these plugins moving and/or becoming 
product quality.

Comment 2 Ed Burnette 2004-09-16 17:53:06 EDT

I use the FTP part of it on a regular basis to keep an internal web site in 
sync with CVS, so whereever it lives I plan to continue to use it, test it, 
and report any problems or enhancement requests for it. I plan to try out the 
new java.io.File support too.

If the plugin were enhanced to support Secure FTP then I could use it more, to 
maintain my SourceForge account for the eclipsepowered project, but so far it 
hasn't annoyed me enough that I'd invest the time to add that support myself. 
I imagine a number of other SourceForge admins are in the same situation.

Comment 3 Jean-Michel Lemieux 2004-09-20 08:59:10 EDT

One disadvantage of moving to the webtools project is that the release schedules
will be way off and how can we ensure that the target support is available when
the SDK ships and bugs are fixed? The project could remain in the SDK but with
committers from webtools. Is that possible? Bottom line - we need help making
the target support product quality and the location of the actual projects is
not as important. If we can recruit committers from webtools, then good. But I
would like to investigate if the projects could still ship with the SDK.

Comment 4 ilias 2004-09-20 11:37:18 EDT

You should not made this case more complicated as it is.

Fact: 
- you confuse users, due to the non-inclusion in the SDK
- you confuse users, as ftp/WebDAV is expected under webtools.
- Platform.team has not enouth resources to extend/stabelize WebDAV
- Platform does not use WebDAV (remember: SDK does not include WebDAV)
- ftp and WebDAV are webstandards, this modules belong definitely to
webtools.WST (thus platform should release control over those modules and
webtools.WST should include them.)
- webtools.WST would most possibly use WebDAV, thus increasing quality.
- Platform.team can still use WebDAV for seperate examples or anything else
(nothing changes essentially).


As stated initially: further rationales/discussion
http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/article.php?id=1376&group=eclipse.webtools

Comment 5 DJ Houghton 2007-06-20 13:53:07 EDT

This component is no longer being actively developed. We encourage users to investigate the capabilities of the Eclipse Web Tools Project.