Team API in Eclipse 3.0

The original plan for Team API in Eclipse 3.0 is presented in the Eclipse 3.0 Team Plan Item Overview. This document revises this plan and discusses the motivation for any changes. Of particular interest is the decision to drop the adoption of JSR 147 from the 3.0 plan. This document also summarizes the API provided by Team, indicating changes and additions.

The revised plan

Our proposed improvements to the Team provider integration include the following high-level work items in the Eclipse 3.0 timeframe:

1. Provide a non-versioning Deployment Provider integration point. This mainly affects the Target Management plugins.
   Timeline: Initial conversion of FTP to be completed for M7.
   
2. Promote the support of a Team API by repository vendors.
   Dropped from 3.0: will be considered again when JSR is more mature.
   
3. Improved Synchronize view with simplified integration API.
   Timeline: majority of API finalization for M7 with necessary adjustments as required.
   
4. Support concurrent execution of operations.
   Timeline: support has been available since M4 and adjustments have been ongoing. See the referenced document.

Point 1 has been changed to address non-versioning repositories only. Originally, it was envisioned that there would be some relationship between versioning and non-versioning support. However, the decision was made to keep these two entities separate.

Point 2 has been dropped from the 3.0 plan because JSR 147 is in it's early stages and could not be fit into the 3.0 release timeframe. However, we still believe that a Team API will only be possible if it is driven by the repository vendors themselves. Hence, we will continue to monitor the progress of the JSR and hope to adopt it at some point in the future.

Summary of Team API in Eclipse 3.0

The focus of the Team API is Eclipse 3.0 continues to be the rich integration of repository support into Eclipse.

Existing API in 2.1

The following API exisited in Eclipse 2.1 and remains in Eclipse 3.0. For the most part there have been no changes to the API listed below. Any changes that have been made are mentioned and are 100% backwards compatible.

• Project Sets
  • plan to improve support for headless operation (contribution)
  • considering the addition of API to access information about project set entries
• Ignored Resources List (unchanged)
• File Content Types (unchanged)
• RepositoryProvider and Core hooks (validate Save/Edit and Move/Delete)
  • validateSave/Edit?
• RepositoryProviderType
  • changes related to project set changes

New API in 3.0

API has been added in 3.0 to ease the implementation of repository and deployment providers.

• Concurrency Support: Although not technically a Team API, consurrency support will affect repository provider implementors (link to doc)
• TeamSubscriber and synchronization infrastructure: This API provides reusable components for creating synchronization tools.
• DeploymentProvider: This API provides lifecycle management for deployment type repositories such as FTP and WebDAV.
• RemoteContentsCache: This API simplifies the caching of remote contents locally (provisional)
• BackgroundEventHandler: Helper class for processing events in the background (provisional)
• SynchronizationCache and subclasses: Helper classes for managing synchronization information (provisional)

Removed Provisional API

In 2.1, Team had some API that was deemed provisional. The following provisional API has been removed from 3.0.

• IRemoteResource
• IRemoteSyncElement and related classes
• SyncView and related classes