Eclipse Marketplace Client 1.7.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

1.7.0

Description

For the most part, this is a maintenance release. Major changes include:

  • Adding self-update capabilities to update the Marketplace Client through its Marketplace entry
  • Improving theme support and making the Marketplace Client look good with the Eclipse IDE Dark Theme
  • Updating the required Java version to Java 1.8 and refactoring the code to make use of the new Java 1.8 language features.
  • Updating the project license to EPL v2.0
API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues

There are no major architectural changes in this release.

MPC UI now depends on E4 CSS bundles to support theming. This dependency was indirectly present already through transitive dependencies on org.eclipse.ui.ide.

The relase was updated to require Java 8, and refactored to use new Java 8 language features. Since most upstream dependencies already required Java 8, this should have no effect on adopters either.

Security Issues

No known security issues.

Non-Code Aspects
Documentation

User and contributor documentation is available on the wiki and in Eclipse help.

Localization and Externalization
  • The code base is fully externalized
  • Localization is available through Babel
Conforms To UI/UX Guidelines
Not verified
Usability Details

There have been no substantial UI changes compared to the previous release.

Theming support has been added, but doesn't impact the default theme's UX. For the Dark Theme, UX has been improved substantially. Colors and fonts are mostly taken from the global IDE theme.

Self update capabilities make it easier for the user to receive updates. Update notifications happen inside MPC, using the notification entries already established in the previous release.

End of Life

No features from the previous release are retired in this release.

Preliminary support for basic auth to api.eclipse.org, found in early milestones of the previous release, have been deprecated and removed on the server as well as in MPC. However, these were never part of a formal release.

Standards

No standards are used or implemented by the Marketplace Client project.

Communities

Input for this release cycle was based on direct feedback from the user and plug-in provider communities from Eclipse events (EclipseCon Europe, NA, France, DemoCamps ...) as well as from personal contact throughout the year. The communities were engaged in the release planning process through bugzilla.

This release is part of Eclipse Photon, Eclipse IDE 2018-09