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1.4.0
This release addresses specific concerns about MPC usability and significant bugs.
The Marketplace Client will become more attractive to users by focusing on presenting solutions relevant to the current Eclipse environment and by enabling better control over the installation of optional add-ons. Additionally, an effort will be made to improve the Marketplace Client's UI performance.
Furthermore, users will be presented with related solutions based on their current install, giving them the opportunity to discover new interesting plug-ins. Initially, this will show solutions by authors from whom the user already has a plug-in installed. This will also help plug-in authors by giving visibility to their other solutions.
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
There are no architectural changes in this release. The public API introduced in 1.3.0 for Luna has proven stable throughout the release cycle.
There are no security issues.
Documentation
User and contributor documentation is available on the wiki and in Eclipse help. UI changes for the management of installed Marketplace entries have been included in the Eclipse help and the wiki has been updated with changes to the REST API.
Localization and Externalization
- The code base is fully externalized
- Localization is available through Babel
Based on feedback from users and from plug-in providers using Marketplace to distribute their solutions, this MPC release aimed to be more attractive to users by focusing on presenting solutions relevant to the current Eclipse environment and by enabling better control over the installation of optional add-ons. Additionally, an effort has been made to improve the Marketplace Client's UI performance.
Specifically:
MPC only lists entries compatible with the running version of Eclipse. Incompatible entries dropped into Eclipse via the Marketplace website are rejected with an information dialog. Each entry can now contain multiple solution versions for different Eclipse versions and OS environments with separate update sites. Selection and filtering happens on the marketplace server based on information sent by MPC.
Entries can also distinguish between required and optional features now. Optional features can be changed after installation through a new 'Change' action on MPC's 'Installed' tab. Also, installation status of entries is more clearly defined now: an entry is considered installed when all its required features are installed.
A new optional Recommendations tab has been included in MPC to list entries related to what the user already has installed. For this purpose, a list of already installed entries is sent to the Marketplace and related entries are returned by the server. This feature needs to be enabled on the server, otherwise the tab is not shown. Initially, it will stay disabled for the Mars release.
A new moderated 'Eclipse Project' market has been added to the Marketplace that contains Release Train projects. An optional tab to show this market more prominently in MPC has been added, but will also need to be enabled on the server. In a later release, MPC might also advertise this market with a separate Welcome Page entry and/or a light-weight view.
Performance improvements have been made by optimizing client-side caching of REST requests and image downloads and by loading images asynchronously in a more intelligent fashion. More performance improvements to the UI would be possible through changes in the underlying P2 Discovery UI, but this requires larger changes and has been postponed until after Mars.
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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