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3.5.0
[Note: This release record project plan was from our project plan of January 9, 2013. (http://www.eclipse.org/tm/development/tm_plan_3_5.xml). Subsequent releases will have their project plans posted within the release record.]
Please send comments about this plan to the tm-dev@eclipse.org developer mailing list (subscription info).
The Target Management Project provides data models, frameworks and tools for working with remote computer systems. The main deliverable is the Remote System Explorer (RSE), a feature-rich integrated perspective and toolkit for seamlessly working on remote systems. Besides that, we deliver flexible, re-usable components for Networking and Target Management that run stand-alone or integrated with RSE.
In terms of interfaces to other Eclipse projects, we provide an Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) provider to allow remote resources be mapped into an Eclipse Workspace. The DLTK and CDT projects are other Eclipse projects known to integrate with Target Management. PTP and PDT can use TM services via the underlying DLTK and CDT layers. Several Eclipse Packages include TM (The Eclipse for Web package, for instance, includes the TM Terminal).
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
Architectural Issues remain essentially unchanged from our 3.4 release
- Target Management's strength remains its well-proven extensible subsystem / services concept and terminal implementations
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Legacy code (especially RSE) still needs some cleanup
- Continued work on UI / Non-UI separation and componentization
- EFS provider very problematic – commercial PHP vendors rolling their own for remote access in newer releases
- Still some minimal Platform non-API use but validated on 4.3
- We continue to concentrate on building up our unit test suites and have not yet automated UI testing
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We have overlap with other projects - There are many remote access APIs
- E.g. Remote File Service – 3 APIs: Platform EFS, ECF fileshare, RSE IFileService
- Disconnected “Remote Development (RDT)” effort at IBM / PTP
- TCF / Target Explorer as a lightweight re-implementation
Target Management is not affected by any of the security vulnerabilities listed in either the resolved vulnerabilities or committer-private vulnerabilities.
The TM 3.5 release concentrated on platform currency, defect removal, and release engineering issues (move to git, maven, tycho, hudson). No functional changes were made. As a result non-code aspects remain unchanged from previous years.
- User documentation and tutorials (available on help.eclipse.org)
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ISV documentation and tutorials
- Includes Javadoc, Architectural overview and 3 tutorials
- EclipseCon Tutorials with code, Webinar, Wiki-based FAQ
- New&Noteworthy / Build Notes with each Milestone
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Working Example Code
- Adding a custom subsystem
- Adding a custom service
- Adding a remote popup menu action
- Adding a remote Preference page
- Externalization and Accessibility guidelines followed
- Localization by IBM as well as the Babel project
Target Managment provides seamless access to remote files, processes, and other resources. Resource subsystems have been tailored to target operating systems such as MVS and the IBM i in addition to board-level resources.
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File Management
- Edit, Compare, search and move remote files as if they were local
- Browse remote archives as virtual filesystem
- Optimized for minimal data transfer (as opposed to EFS)
- Shell and Processes subsystems
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Generic resource management framework for vendor-specific subsystems
- IBM i
- IBM MVS
- Used by CDT, PTP/RDT, Linuxtools / Yocto and some commercial
- Used heavily by IBM Rational products
- Lightweight embeddable Terminal widget used commercially
TM follows Eclipse User Interface Guidelines with no known deviations.
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Externalization and Accessibility guidelines followed
- Keyboard accessibility of all items verified
- Menu items for special keys
- Messages marked up properly for screen readers
- Increased US Federal Government emphasis on accessibilty prompted several fixes in this area for TM 3.5 M6.
- All UI-visible Strings are externalized (tested with Babel)
- Externalization mostly through Eclipse NLS mechanism, partially through systemMessages.xml
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Localizations provided by
- IBM for its Rational products
- the Eclipse Babel project
Since Target Management supports the modular introduction of protocols and target implementations into its service and subsystems layers. These may be added or dropped as demand waxes or wanes.
- There have been discussions in the past about dropping telnet support but those have not yet been acted on.
- WinCE support, which had been incubating, remains in the git source code repository but is no longer being built.
Target Management is built on top of standard communications services. In addition to those provided by the standard Java class libraries TM supports the following:
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RFC 959 FTP
- Also supports RFC 1579 firewall-friendly FTP
- Supported through Jakarta Commons/Net
- For details, see http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/net/
- FTP passive mode becomes the default for FTP connections in the TM 3.5 release
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RFC 4251 ssh2
- Also supports RFC 4252, 4253, 4254, 4256 (KI-authentication)
- draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-13 for sftp
- Supported through com.jcraft.jsch
- For details, see http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/
The Target Management project is a mature project. It is approaching a maintenance-only status. Community participation has decreased as a result.
Contributors and Committers-
7 active committers since releasing 3.4
- IBM (David McKnight, David Dykstal, Xuan Chen, Jose Manuel Garcia Maciel)
- Wind River (Uwe Stieber, Martin Oberhuber)
- MontaVista (Anna Dushistova)
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6 additional contributors from IBM, Wind River, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Red Hat, VMWare
- was 7 in 3.4 – contributions down as code continues to mature
- Mailing list and Newsgroup participation becoming less active
- occasional posts as well as contributions do show end user adoption
- Many adopters at Eclipse (CDT, PDT/RDT, DLTK) other OSS (Yocto) and commercial
- Many adopters also contributing, plus several occasionally seen on the newsgroup or mailing list
- Monthly open conf calls are de facto committer calls – mostly offline communication
Other
- No other activity such as articles or conference participation
Release Review
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