Comment 1 Mik Kersten 2009-04-16 23:45:03 EDT

David: Please post the outcome from our previous discussion here.

Comment 2 David Green 2009-04-17 00:47:02 EDT

An ideal XML format would have readily available tooling for both defining the format and for using it.  It would also be familiar to Eclipse plug-in developers, since that's our target developer group.  With this in mind I propose that we use the plugin.xml format with an extension point for defining connectors.  

Here's a sample of what it might look like.  Note that I haven't externalized strings for clarity:

pre. 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<plugin>
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.core.connectorDiscovery">
      <connectorDescriptor
            categoryId="org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.test.sample.connectorCategory1"
            description="A sample connector for testing purposes"
            id="org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.test.sample.connectorDescriptor1"
            kind="task"
            license="Acme Public License 1.0"
            name="Acme Task System"
            provider="Acme Inc."
            siteUrl="http://www.acme.inc.nodomain/mylyn/update3x">
         <overview
               screenshot="images/ats-screenshot.png"
               summary="an overview of the connector"
               url="http://www.acme.inc.nodomain/mylyn/update3x/ats-overview.html">
         </overview>
         <icon
               image128="icons/ats128.png"
               image16="icons/ats16.png"
               image32="icons/ats32.png"
               image48="icons/ats48.png"
               image64="icons/ats64.png">
         </icon>
      </connectorDescriptor>
      <connectorDescriptor
      ... snip ...
      </connectorDescriptor>
   </extension>
</plugin>
   
The format provides facilities for describing both the connector and the provider of the connector (in some instances they are not the same).

Packaging this format in a jar would allow for relative resource references for things such as images.  The jar need not be an OSGi bundle, since it would not be installed into the runtime.  The jar format should however be compatible with the OSGi bundle conventions to leverage existing tooling, however no OGSi-specific manifest entries are required.  As such the plugin.xml would be at the root of the jar.

Comment 3 David Green 2009-04-24 15:19:56 EDT

Candidate exsd is available here: @org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.core/schema/connectorDiscovery.exsd@

Comment 4 David Green 2009-04-24 15:19:59 EDT

Created attachment 133169 [details]
mylyn/context/zip

Comment 5 David Green 2009-05-11 14:39:56 EDT

Completed.  Please provide additional feedback as new bugs.