[eclipse-dev] Clarification in use of Platform.resolve() and Platform.as

[Thomas Watson <tjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The behavior of org.eclipse.core.runtime.resolve(URL)
has changed in the latest eclipse 3.0 code.

This method used to resolve URL's that
use the platform protocol to a URL that uses the file protocol.  As
a result some code in eclipse is making the assumption that the returned
URL will always be a file URL.  The Platform java doc does not restrict
the URL returned from resolve() to a URL that uses the file protocol.  It
could be any protocol that the platform URLhandler is using to connect
to the actual URL resource.

Now that eclipse is running on top of
OSGi the actual protocol that is being used by platform URLs is the bundle
protocol.  So URL's returned by Platform.resolve() are no long just
file URLs.  If you need to have an actual file URL then you must use
the Platform.asLocalURL() method.  This method is the only guaranteed
way to get a file URL from a platform URL.

Thomas Watson