Release Date
Deliverables
The release deliverables are:
- MPC source code for the release is available in the eclipse.org Git repositories.
- MPC runtime binaries and source bundles (on eclipse.org update sites and as download archive).
MPC 1.5.0 source code will be available as versions tagged "R1_5_0" in the project's Git repository.
Compatibility
- REST API Compatibility: Release 1.5 will be backward compatible with previous versions of the Marketplace REST API
- Compatibility with Previous Releases: All public API will be compatible with previous releases. Additional public API will be provided. A best effort is made to keep internal API, specifically Marketplace data model and REST services compatible, but minor changes are to be expected.
Internationalization
The user interface elements provided by the Marketplace Client components, including dialogs and error messages, are externalized. The English strings are provided as the default resource bundles.
The content of the Marketplace itself is English. No plans for internationalization in this release.
Target Environments
Release 1.5 will be compatible with Eclipse 4.6 on the same operating systems as the Eclipse Packages produced by the Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP) for the Neon simultaneous release (MS Windows 7 or above, Mac OS X 10.10 Cocoa, Linux x86 GTK – each 32-bit and 64-bit).
| Name | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| M7 | 2016/05/05 | Feature completion, will be available in Neon M7. |
| RC1 | 2016/05/18 | <p> Response to community feedback and updates to documentation </p><p> <a name="rampdown"></a><strong>Ramp Down:</strong> After RC1 is released, builds will be produced weekly until the final 1.4 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. </p> |
| RC2 | 2016/05/25 | Release Candidate |
| RC3 | 2016/06/01 | Release Candidate |
| RC4 | 2016/06/08 | Release Candidate. Final Build. |
| Final Release | 2016/06/22 | MPC Release 1.5 as part of Eclipse Neon Release |
Themes
User interaction
This release will introduce management of Marketplace favorites directly in MPC, facilitating the new Eclipse User Storage Service (USS), allowing users to see and change their favorites without leaving MPC.
Additionally, this release aims to remove unnecessary obstacles in MPC's workflows, like wizard pages that don't require a meaningful action by the user, or showing entries that won't work with the current environment (Eclipse version, Java version, ...).
Finally, user support to install better editors for currently unbound file extensions aims to improve user experience and expose helpful solutions on the Marketplace by proactively suggesting editor plugins from the Marketplace when opening files with an unknown/unbound type.
Maintainability
This release will start a process of modernizing and cleaning up the internal implementation and code base by improving the MPC's implementation of the Marketplace REST interface.
MPC's implementation of the Marketplace REST interface currently revolves around a hand-crafted XML parser, a POJO data model and a transport layer backed by P2. During the last few development cycles, this implementation has shown its age, making changes for new features and bug fixes unnecessarily complicated and brittle, or even impossible given the current infra-structure.
It is intended to look into alternatives to the P2 backend offering more flexibility and more direct control over the HTTP communication. Also, replacing the XML parsing infrastructure with a less handcrafted approach using e.g. JAXB or EMF will be evaluated.
This process is expected to continue through the next service releases and a similar process is planned for the UI in the Neon+1 development cycle.
Network communication
This release will introduce a more direct HTTP transport strategy, giving more direct access and control over the range of HTTP capabilities to the MPC codebase.
In addition to cleaning up the MPC communication stack's codebase and unifying the different communication approaches for querying the remote Marketplace server and sending installation and error reports, this change also aims at addressing a number of recurring networking issues that have been surfaced in the Mars release cycle thanks to the new Error Reporter service. Two main concerns in this area are slow and faulty connections, and proxy setups, specifically with authenticating proxies.
This release is part of Neon