update
dynamic update/install/field service
Development Resources

If you are already a Platform Update developer, check out the Development Resources.
Update

The update component is designed to keep plug-ins executing within the Eclipse environment up to date with any available changes. It provides mechanisms for:

  • discovering location of updates (on the Web, or local file system)
  • adding new plug-ins to Eclipse
  • updating existing plug-ins
  • managing local user Eclipse installation configuration
What's Happening?

The focus now is on fixing critical bugs for 3.1.1 and planning for 3.2.

In addition to the existing feature requests, the update team will investigate items from the following list:

Enterprise Ready

As the number and range of Eclipse plug-ins continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to have a powerful update/install story. For instance, if more information about an Eclipse install was available earlier, it would be possible to pre-validate that it would be a compatible location to install particular new features and plug-ins. This information could also be used to deal with conflicting contributions. Update should also be improved to reduce the volume of data that is transferred for a given update.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.

 

3.1.1 Maintenance effort

3.2 Development Effort - Sept 23, 2005 - Milestone 2 (3.2 M2)

  • Improve reliability of existing transport implementation
  • Revisit caching of remote files. Cache downloaded files between sessions. Cache all files, not only plug-ins. Reduce unmanaged remote connections.
  • Refactor existing code to separate maintaining configuration from installation logic.
  • Bug fixes

3.2 Development Effort - Nov. 4, 2005 - Milestone 3 (3.2 M3)

  • Mirroring improvements:
    • Investigate if server side mirror handling would be a better alternative
    • Provide a silent alternative to the current prompt-based mirroring
    • Allow users to still choose the mirror site manually
  • Download performance improvements:
    • Use multiple jobs to improve performance while searching for updates and browsing
  • Update lock:
    • Introduce a state lock when the update session starts to prevent subsequent update requests from corrupting the session
    • Investigate performance side-effects of file time stamp checking (invalidate the cache between sessions if there is too much overhead)
  • JUnit tests revisited:
    • Perform a full sweep of the current Update Core JUnit tests to make sure they are still valid
  • Bug fixes

3.2 Development Effort - Dec. 16, 2005 - Milestone 4 (3.2 M4)

  • Migrating to shared configuration.
  • Improving performance and robustness of update core
  • Improving performance and robustness of update UI
  • Bug fixes
 
Get Involved!

If you are interested in participating in the development of the Update component, check out the developer's mailing list: platform-update-dev@eclipse.org. Chat with people there about your problems and interests, and find out what you can do to help.

In particular, if you are interested in software update functions, have dealt with security consideration for updating over open Web, or are interested in hosting Eclipse solutions from the Web, the Update team would like to hear from you.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.