Eclipse Marketplace Client™ 1.6.0

This release focuses on making Marketplace Favorites a central element of the Marketplace experience. It helps users discover favorites by providing suggestions based on what's popular, as well as making it more easy to discover, view and import other users' favorite lists.

Changing favorites requires for the user to have an account at eclipse.org and to sign into it in the Marketplace Client. To make this more convenient and transparent to the user, eclipse.org has introduced an OAuth authentication endpoint. With this release, MPC will use OAuth and integrate with the OAuth account management in Eclipse provided by the User Storage SDK.

In addition, automated discovery for unknown project natures is provided by MPC, finding Marketplace entries for the missing natures and informing users if support plug-ins are found on the Marketplace when importing projects with unknown natures into the workspace. The similar editor discovery from last release will be improved to provide a clearer UX for users wanting to tweak the discovery.

Finally, this release introduces native Windows support for corporate proxies using NTLM or SPNEGO authentication relying on system tokens to authenticate the domain user. This should improve the Marketplace experience for users in such networks, no longer requiring them to manually configure alternative communication configurations in their eclipse.ini.

Release Date
Release Type
Minor release
This release is part of Eclipse Oxygen
Name Date Description
M7 2017/05/19 Feature completion, will be available in Oxygen M7.
RC1 2017/05/26 Response to community feedback and updates to documentation Ramp Down: After RC1 is released, builds will be produced weekly until the final 1.6 release. In the RC phase only bugs marked P1 or higher or severity major or higher will be fixed. APIs will not change except to address critical fixes requiring approval of at least two committers.
RC2 2017/06/02 Release Candidate
RC3 2017/06/09 Release Candidate
RC4 2017/06/16 Release Candidate. Final Build.
Final Release 2017/06/28 MPC Release 1.6 as part of Eclipse Oxygen Release
Reviews
Eclipse Marketplace Client™ 1.6.0 Release Review
Themes
Marketplace Favorites
With the introduction of the Eclipse Userstorage SDK (USS) and access to various eclipse.org account data at api.eclipse.org, it is planned to provide users with a central way to log into their Eclipse account during installation, and/or first start of the Eclipse workspace. Building on this, the MPC Favourites list will be made more front and center in both the Marketplace Client and overall workspace setup to improve the end user experience, making it very easy to find and install favourite plugins as part of the setup process. MPC will use the provided Eclipse.org account login to read the user's Favorites and present them for installation. It is planned to offer an action on the Eclipse Welcome Screen that opens the Favorites list in MPC and offers the user's favorites for easy installation. Additionally, im-porting favorites lists from other users, currently already supported in MPC by pasting the list URL into an import wizard, will be possible by drag&drop of the URL onto the Eclipse window, as is the case for installation of individual Marketplace entries.
Feature Discovery
For the Neon release, an auto-discovery mechanism for editors supporting new file types via the Eclipse Marketplace was introduced. The implementation in Neon has proven a success and has received positive attention from end users. However, a number of usability issues have been raised through end user feedback as well. This release will improve on the discovery user experience based this feedback. Furthermore, the Marketplace-based discovery will be extended to include lookup for plug-ins providing support for missing project natures when the user imports an existing project e.g. from disk or VCS.
Network communication
Further improvements will be made to MPC's network stack. This includes improved support for corporate proxies using NTLM or SPNEGO authentication in Windows domains. Also, this release aims to improve network wait times by improving caching and by loading typically requested Marketplace resources in the background ahead of time before the Marketplace Client is opened and/or on first MPC start.