RE: [platform-vcm-dev] The WVCM API

["Clemm, Geoff" <gclemm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

   From: Steve K Speicher [mailto:sspeiche@xxxxxxxxxx]

   A few of us here who are somewhat eclipse literate don't understand
   the statement: "headless TeamOperations API for Eclipse".  Is the
   proposal available somewhere?  What problem does this solve for the
   Eclipse VCM?

"Headless" just means "does not invoke a GUI".  This is in contrast
to an API method like validateEdit(), which commonly will pop up a
GUI (asking the user things like "would you like to checkout this
file?").  A "TeamOperations API" lets a client access and update
information shared between multiple team members.

An initial proposal for a "headless TeamOperations API" appeared in
Eclipse-1.0 (actually, it was called the "TeamAction API", I believe),
but since it did not prove to be suitable for use by existing Team
providers, it was deprecated in Eclipse-2.0 (it never was part of the
Eclipse API).  For a thread on this topic, see:
<http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/platform-vcm-dev/msg00323.html>.

For a current thread on this topic, see:
<http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/platform-vcm-dev/msg00456.html>.
For another message on this topic, see:
<http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/platform-vcm-dev/msg00326.html>.

   I read the mentioned document and don't see any mention of Eclipse,
   so I'm not sure of the intended connection.

WVCM is not targeted specifically at the Eclipse platform, but it was
designed with Eclipse in mind, and with the original Eclipse
"TeamAction API" in mind as well.  In particular, making sure that a
simple subset of the WVCM API could be used effectively with a
non-versioning server was primarily derived from the goals of the
Eclipse-1.0 TeamAction API.

   I can only assume that it based on reading JSR-147, that it solves
   the mentioned WebDAV subproject goal of:

       Ideally the WebDAV component (or part thereof) would be
       somewhat stand-alone from the platform itself and would form a
       contribution to the WebDAV and Delta-V communities which do not
       have a fully functional, open-source, Java WebDAV client.

No, JSR-147 does not provide any WebDAV protocol functionality, but
rather its semantics were defined to be compatible with those of the
WebDAV/DeltaV protocol, so that an implementation could use the
WebDAV/DeltaV protocol to communicate with its server.

So a particular implementation of the WVCM API could chose to use the
WebDAV/DeltaV protocol to communicate with its server, and could use
the Eclipse WebDAV component to do so.  But alternatively, a WVCM API
implementation could use Web Services, RPC over TCP/IP, or even just
use a shared network file system to store the "server state".

Cheers,
Geoff