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Re: [platform-update-dev] RE: [eclipse-dev] Web-triggered updates
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Ed,
You raise the valid issues and ideally it would be great it we could get to
that level of seamless integration (although it is not clear whether it
would mean much on non-Windows platforms).
One of your observations is not correct - you don't have to run the browser
inside the Preview view - just need to launch it from the 'Updates' view.
On non-Windows platforms, this is the only way (no OLE integration with IE
there, so external browsers open in their own windows).
I will try to sell you our vision of the usefulness of web-triggered
updates. The main concern it addresses (even in the current limited
implementation) is that we (Eclipse) remove ourselves as the sole provider
and presenter of the features. In the default (basic) scenario, you enter
the update site bookmark in the Updates view and expand it. This allows you
to browse feature categories and features (including their hierarchy). We
provide fairly slick feature preview on the right but it is closed in that
its layout and content is fully controlled by Eclipse. Similarly, we run
the search ourselves and present you with the results.
In web-triggered updates, we move to the back seat and allow providers to
fully own the update site presentation. They can use the most sophisticated
web applications to present, classify, filter and otherwise surface
available features to the user. They can ask users for quick votes. They
can provide useful links that take them to documentation libraries or
useful information. They can implement shopping cart pattern (add to cart,
checkout). They can provide much more sophisticated searches etc. etc. It
is only at the 'checkout' point where they call back into Eclipse and cause
our install wizard to come up to actually complete the install. This final
step can be slicker (using system-wide URL handler and/or DDE although this
is not without its own issues), but all the previous benefits remain.
On the DDE/URL handler issues, if you have multiple Eclipse-based products
installed, which one is launched? Hard to tell. In our current solution,
each running Eclipse runs the application server on a different port, and
passes that port to the browser, so features are always installed into the
'right' Eclipse copy.
If you go visit download pages of large companies, you can notice that they
typically have elaborate, database-backed Web applications behind these
pages. The idea of Web-triggered updates is to allow them to integrate one
extra link or button that installs the code directly into running Eclipse,
rather than scrap all these pages and try to shoe horn all their Eclipse
offering through the limitations of the 'Updates' view in the Update
Manager perspective.
Regards,
Dejan Glozic, Ph.D.
Manager, Eclipse Platform Components
D2/MY7/8200/MKM
IBM Canada Ltd.
Tel. 905 413-2745 T/L 969-2745
Fax. 905 413-4854
"Ed Burnette"
<Ed.Burnette@xxxxxxx> To: <platform-update-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: cc:
platform-update-dev-admin@ Subject: [platform-update-dev] RE: [eclipse-dev] Web-triggered updates
eclipse.org
02/27/2003 01:54 PM
Please respond to
platform-update-dev
I don't see the usefulness of this given you have to be running the browser
inside the Preview window of Eclipse and the user also has to turn on an
option to enable it. It would be better if Eclipse installed a system-wide
URL handler or special file type or something that allowed triggered
updates from any browser.
Instead of clicking on a zip file, downloading, unpacking, and restarting
Eclipse manually, you would click on this install link and it would ask if
you wanted to install and tell you whether it was signed or not, etc., and
if you say yes it would figure out where to unpack the package and request
Eclipse that it restart itself. Care would have to be taken not to open a
security hole, perhaps by disallowing custom installers and native code.
On Windows this could be done with some kind of DDE message or by
associating eclipse.exe with a certain file type like .eci and having
eclipse.exe detect which eclipse(s) were running and control them.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dejan@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:dejan@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 4:15 PM
> To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx; platform-update-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [eclipse-dev] Web-triggered updates
>
>
> Since January integration builds, Update component supports
> Web-triggered
> update technology. This powerful new capability allows
> providers to set up
> web sites with whatever technology and layout they want, and
> simply use
> special URLs to call back into Eclipse and initiate a feature
> install. You
> can read about it in the following document:
>
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-update-home/doc/working/web-triggered-updates.html
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