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FAQ What APIs exist for integrating repository clients into Eclipse?
Repositories, or version and configuration management (VCM) tools, are an essential part of software development. A wide variety of code repositories and a larger number of client-side tools for interacting with those repositories are available. These clients range from rudimentary command line tools to rich graphical clients that are deeply integrated with other development tools. As a tool-integration platform, repository client integration is an important aspect of Eclipse. From the very start, the core architecture of the Eclipse Platform has striven to allow deep integration of these repository client tools.
Early on, Eclipse used the term VCM as a label for its repository integration
components. Because acronyms in general aren’t particularly descriptive and because
this particular acronym didn’t seem to be widely understood, the Eclipse Platform adopted
the term team tools as a replacement. This is why the repository APIs
are found in the plug-ins org.eclipse.team.core and org.eclipse.team.ui
and why the developers writing this stuff call themselves the team team.
As with many Eclipse components, team tooling is divided into a generic, repository-agnostic
layer and then separate layers for specific repository clients. The platform includes a reference
implementation of the generic team APIs, which implements a powerful graphical
client for integrating with concurrent versions system, or CVS.
The team API centers on the notion of a repository provider. Each project in an
Eclipse workspace can be associated with a single RepositoryProvider subclass that
acts as the entry point for repository interaction. The RepositoryProvider API and the
remainder of the team-integration APIs are extremely well documented, so we don’t need to go
into more detail here.
The Platform Plug-in Developer Guide includes detailed documentation on how to implement your own repository provider. See the section Programmer’s guide > Team support.
See Also:
FAQ_What_support_does_the_workspace_have_for_team_tools?
This FAQ was originally published in Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs. Copyright 2004, Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This text is made available here under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0.