[wtp-dev] Unused and Misused WTP Extension Points

[John Lanuti <jlanuti@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Take a look at the Extension Point Usage
Scan Report: http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/development/apiscanner/reports/combinedExtPtUsage.html

There, you'll see the extension point
usage scans for two of our largest adopters, IBM and BEA, as well as any
extension point usages within WTP.  This report is interesting for
two reasons:

(1) It may be worthwhile for us to design
a mechanism, maybe using the component.xml, to declare extension points
as API or as internal.  We have a lot of extension points which only
have one reference within WTP, and it is probably debateable whether an
extension point was the best solution there anyways.  It could be
argued all extension points should be API by definition, but I know as
a project, that's not how we're using them.  We have too many extension
points with one internal reference for that to be the case.  I am
especially thinking of those only used for classloading purposes.

(2) There are a number of extension
points which aren't being used at all.  This is very alarming, and
we should remove/clean these up for sure.

Extension points not being used:

org.eclipse.wst.common.emfworkbench.integration.ModifierHelperFactory
org.eclipse.wst.common.frameworks.ui.DataModelWizardExtension
org.eclipse.wst.common.frameworks.ui.extendedViewer
org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.ui.wizard
org.eclipse.wst.common.ui.properties.propertySections
org.eclipse.wst.validation.referencialFileValidator
org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.J2EEModulePostImport
org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.core.jndiBindingsHelpers
org.eclipse.jst.server.core.internalRuntimeComponentProviders
org.eclipse.wst.internet.monitor.core.internalContentFilters
org.eclipse.wst.server.core.installableRuntimes
org.eclipse.wst.wsdl.ui.ExtensionsSchemasDescription
org.eclipse.wst.wsdl.ui.WSDLEditorExtensionConfiguration
org.eclipse.wst.html.ui.deviceProfileEntryProvider
org.eclipse.wst.xsd.ui.ExtensionsSchemasDescription
org.eclipse.wst.xsd.ui.XSDEditorExtensionConfiguration
org.eclipse.wst.xsd.ui.extensionCategories
org.eclipse.wst.xsd.ui.internalEditorConfiguration


I can start opening defects for these
unused extension points if you like.

Thoughts?

John Lanuti
IBM Web Tools Platform Technical Lead, IBM Rational
IBM Software Lab - Research Triangle Park, NC
jlanuti@xxxxxxxxxx
t/l 441-7861