1.3
This release addresses specific concerns about MPC usability and significant bugs. It aims to make the installation process from the Eclipse Marketplace website via Drag&Drop more reliable across platforms and will provide improvements in the MPC UI.
Further, a stable public API for the Marketplace Client is planned, that will offer both lower-level access to the information provided through the Marketplace REST API, as well as higher-level access to discovery, search and install functions in the UI.
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
The basic architecture of MPC has not changed in this release.
MPC has a modular implementation strongly based on established Java technology standards. At its core, it encapsulates REST-based communication with remote Marketplace servers. On top of that, Discovery and Installation functionality and UI are offered, heavily leveraging and building on standard Eclipse installation management and discovery functions provided by the Eclipse Equinox P2 project.
In previous releases, interaction between MPC UI and core components has happened through internal API that has proven very stable over the time. This API, exposing REST communication services, as well as additional API to open and control the Marketplace Wizard, has been made public in this release. All API is exposed through OSGi services. This allows third parties to easily consume these APIs and build on the MPC to interact with the Wizard UI as well as with remote Marketplace servers.
The move to a public API required the deprecation of several classes in the old internal API. Deprecated internal API classes are currently kept for backwards compatibility and might be removed in a future major release.
There are no known security issues.
Documentation
- User and contributor documentation is available on the wiki and in Eclipse help.
- No new user interface or UI changes requiring documentation have been introduced in this release
Localization and Externalization
- The code base is fully externalized
- Localization is available through Babel
MPC workflow has been streamlined based on user feedback. Specifically
- Making the MPC Wizard a non-modal window now allows for better interaction between MPC wizard and embedded browser showing Marketplace entries (i.e. "Learn more" links) as well as working with the IDE and the MPC Wizard in parallel (e.g. continue working while MPC runs) (bugs 424729 and 322022).
- Responsiveness of the Wizard has been improved by fixing several UI Flashing/Refresh issues (bugs 312746, 408869, 408872)
- Drag&Drop of Marketplace install links, as a central interaction scheme between MPC and Marketplace servers, has been improved to work in most parts of the Eclipse IDE window as expected by users (bug 433333
Other:
- "Update" button behavior for installed items has been fixed (bug 421691, bug 430410)
- Marketplace Icon is used consistently to represent MPC in menus, About Eclipse and Welcome Screen