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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.
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
There are no major architectural changes in this release.
A new dependency to the Oauth Support provided by Eclipse User Storage API (USS) has been introduced, which is used to provide sign-in and account management for the Marketplace in general and user favorites in particular.
MPC introduced native proxy support for Windows based on Apache HTTPClient Windows libraries and JNA to support corporate proxies through its Apache HTTPClient transport introduced in MPC 1.5.0. This is expected to solve network issues for users in such environments who previously had to rely on workarounds to gain network access for MPC.
To follow best practices, this release stops shipping HTTPClient libraries as fixed part of its features. Libraries are still provided in the release repositories, but only imported by features and bundles using more lax version ranges instead of a fixed version.
No known security issues.
Documentation
User and contributor documentation is available on the wiki and in Eclipse help.
New REST API endpoints will be documented by the Marketplace Web project using API documentation tooling. A preview is currently available at http://chrisguindon.com/eclipse_api/
Localization and Externalization
- The code base is fully externalized
- Localization is available through Babel
This release focused on making Favorites a more central element both on the Marketplace website and in MPC. As such, several usability improvements have been introduced to discover and interact with favorites more easily:
- Login to access and change personal favorites has been switched to use OAuth through USS, providing a much better login workflow and integrating with USS's OAuth account management
- On first launch in a new installation, MPC will prompt users to re-install their favorites
- If users are not logged in when checking their favorites, the login widget was improved, and we now show suggestions to get new users started with populating their personal favorites
- Import Favorites now explains better where and how to get existing favorite lists. It also provides a number of random public favorite lists from other users as a starting point.
- Favorite list URLs can now be drag&dropped onto the IDE, the Marketplace Client, or the Favorite List import wizard from the website. The Favorites URL has been made more prominent on the Website as well, and an explanation added similar to the "Install Now" d&d link
In addition, the user experience for missing feature discovery through Marketplace has been improved
- Feedback for the Editor discovery introduced in 1.5.0 has been incorporated, providing clearer options for the user to customize their discovery options and to opt-out
- Discovery for missing natures has been implemented to help users get started with projects imported from disk or VCS if their IDE lacks support for the required project types/natures
No features are retired in this release.
No standards are used or implemented by the Marketplace Client project.
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 the mpc-dev mailing list and bugzilla as well.
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