ECF/Shared Code Plugin

Project Lead: Marcelo Mayworm

Mentor(s): Scott Lewis, Ken Gilmer

Project Motivation

The Shared Code Project is a small set of Eclipse plugins to support dynamic source code search and sharing among a team of Eclipse users. The SCP idea is to provide developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code and share source code among developers, which can be leveraged in the applications. Developers can make yours source code on Eclipse Workspace available to a lot of people, adding special metadata into these source code, making way for others developers find easy source code, in ways never possible before. SCP is based in a peer-to-peer communications and file sharing, therefore, the intention is to use the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) as base, because ECF provides an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform, using a peer-to-peer network. SCP focuses on the development of tool of collaborative.

Goals

1. Enable easy-to-user searching of source code across multiple Eclipse workspaces
2. Support metadata-based searches using Eclipse markers. See here for candidate metadata types and screenshots.
3. Support the delivery and view/presentation of matching source code in response to remote search requests
4. Support search restriction based upon source license type, as well as individual and group-level search restrictions

See here more details of how these goals will be achieved.

Schedule

Project's schedule is in SCP Schedule, you can be well aware of tasks and status about the project.

Architecture

All the relevant characteristics of SCP Architecture can be figured out in ScpArchitecture.

Screenshots

Screenshots were produced from the SCP and placed where it can be easily seen - Screenshots SCP.

Plug'in Usage

• This simple story describes the user value provided by SCP. The story will describe how a developer would have a useful search for source code.
  

How to run a Demo

Once the Shared Code is on workspace, you can run it two different ways. One way is to compile the project, package it up as a JAR file, copy it to the plugins subdirectory, and restart Eclipse. You will see the menu and toolbar button in your workbench.

The other method to run Shared Code is more convenient. Using the Run-time Workbench, you start a temporary Eclipse installation that automatically runs it.

To run and test Shared Code on the run-time workbench, see HOWTO: Shared Code Plugin, it is a step-by-step description of how to install and run the SCP.

How to build

Shared Code plug-in depends on other plug-ins, only internal Eclipse plug-in:

• org.eclipse.ui,
• org.eclipse.core.runtime,
• org.eclipse.search,
• org.eclipse.core.resources,
• org.eclipse.jdt.core,
• org.eclipse.ecf.datashare,
• org.eclipse.ui.ide

PDE takes care of all of these things. PDE has a section Dependency Analysis -> Find plug-ins and fragments that reference this plug-in, that takes care of all dependences of Shared Code plug-in.

To package and export the Shared Code plug-in, the Deployable Plug-ins and Fragments export wizard is used, only select org.eclipse.ecf.example.sharecode. The zip file generated then simply needs to be unzipped into the installation directory of any Eclipse-based product and the Shared Code plug-in becomes part of Eclipse.

Obs: See here the Prerequisites to run Shared Code plug-in, and get the plugin Shared Code from anonymous CVS on soc.eclipse.org and path = /cvsroot/org.eclipse.soc/ org.eclipse.ecf.example.sharecode.

Resources and Talks

This session is a nice place to talk abou ideas and clues with other people about SCP - Talks.

References

• Notes on the Eclipse Plug-in Architecture by Azad Bolour (Bolour Computing) July 2003
• On the Job: The Eclipse Jobs API by Michael Valenta (IBM) September 2004
• Preferences in the Eclipse Workbench UI by Tod Creasey (IBM) August 2002
• Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions by Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woolf