[wtp-dev] The current state of the WebDAV/FTP plugins

[Michael Valenta <Michael_Valenta@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To everyone interested in FTP/WebDAV,

There have been several discussions
lately on various newsgroups and mailing lists about the state of FTP/WebDAV
support in Eclipse. Currently, this support is available as a separate
download from the Eclipse Platform SDK download page. There has been a
recent cleanup and refactoring and the plugins involved can now be divided
into the following categories (the new structure is in HEAD and will start
appearing in next weeks integration builds):

1) Simple clients: There are separate
plugins that provide simple FTP and WebDAV clients with dependencies only
on org.eclipse.core.runtime.
2) Site and Target Resource API: There
is a target resource API and implementations for FTP, WebDAV, java.io.File
and IFile.
3) Site Explorer: The site explorer
allows the creation of sites to any of the above mentioned resource types.
Sites can be browsed and resources can be copied between sites.
3) IDE Integration: The above 3 feature
sets are not tied to the IDE and can be used in an RCP application. There
is additional funtionality for integration into the Team Synchronization
view.

I am posting this message to see what
interest there is in these plugins. As it currently stands, these plugins
are maintained by Team as an example of integration into the Synchronize
view. They are not product quality and there is no future work planned
to make them so. A bug has been logged against Platform WebDAV that proposes
moving these plugins to the Web Tools project. Here is a link to that bug:

   https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=74040

Of course, the proposed move only makes
sense if there are parties in the Web Tools community who are willing to
contribute to these plugins. If you feel that these plugins should be part
of the Web Tools project and you are willing to contribute to them in some
way, please add yourself to the CC list of the above-mentioned bug and
add a comment stating what kind of contribution you are willing to make
(i.e. code contributions, testing, etc.). The amount of interest will gauge
the possibility of these plugins moving and/or becoming product quality.

Regards,
Michael Valenta
Platform Team Component Committer