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Re: [mylar-dev] Need advice on how to go about implementing a connector
Thanks Eugene and Nathan for your help.  I have decided to go with REST and am busy implementing the connector eclipse-plugin.  I got a basic http client working which is able to retrieve XML representation of a task from the server.  Now I'm trying to get things working from the plugin side (using the Trac connector as a reference) and am stuck, would appreciate if you can point me in the right direction:

1) I'm testing by doing "Run Eclipse Application" and my plugin is shown as loaded when I check About --> Plug-in Details.  But I'm not able to see "JTrac" in the list of available repository types.  What is the trick to getting a new entry into the list of choices when you try to "Add Task Repository".  I've implemented AbstractRepositoryConnectorUi and AbstractRepositoryConnector.  Admittedly, since I am trying to get just a "vertical slice" working, some of the AbstractRepositoryConnector methods are returning null, though I tried my best to focus on the ones that matter.  I have tried to set the "Extensions" just like the Trac connector etc.

2) Is it a must that you have to have a "headless" version and a "ui" version defined as separate plugins.  I'm currently having everything in one plugin and the activator is a subclass of "AbstractUIPlugin".

3) I am able to use Apache Http Client libraries exported by org.eclipse.mylar.context.core, which is very helpful.  However when I run unit tests that need the HttpClient, they fail because they depend on commons-logging which is not exported.  Is this intentional?  I am able to proceed now by manually adding commons-logging in a lib folder as a dependency for my plugin.

You can browse the source (View-VC) here: http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/j-trac/trunk/jtrac-mylar/

SVN url: https://j-trac.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/j-trac/trunk/jtrac-mylar

Thanks,

Peter.

On 12/11/06, Eugene Kuleshov < eu@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nathan Hapke wrote:
>> 2) Would you recommend a SOAP or a REST interface for any specific
>> reason or based on experience with JIRA vs BugZilla?
> I didn't write any of the internals of either of these connectors, so
> I can't really comment on that.  My intuition says that it's probably
> more complexity than you need though.
>> 3) Does Mylar recommend any particular remoting protocol, like RMI or
>> Burlap / Hessian
> Mylar makes an effort to make sure that connectors are not imposed any
> restrictions on which connection protocol they wish to use.  if it's
> helpful for you the org.eclipse.mylar.context.core plug-in exports the
> Apache httpclient, and xml-rpc client libraries.
  I am sure Mik will comment on this, but there is some ongoing effort
to unify data structures for repository integration. This JTrac project
could be a really good driver for this. Such unified API would make
integration of the new issue trackers with Mylar much easier.

  Generally I believe that the simpler is the better. Hessian and Burlap
are quite proprietary.

  RMI will be the most troublesome choice because non-http protocols
disabled almost everywhere and even for http many users have to go to
the external world trough proxy. We should also keep in mind non-Java
clients and non-Java servers.

  So, REST over HTTP is probably the best choice, but there is still
plenty of gray area about data structures and what remote calls need to
be exposed.

  regards,
  Eugene