Thursday, November 13, 2008

I just don't have any capabilities

One of the new Requirements For Participation for the Eclipse Galileo Simultaneous Release is Capabilities . As the guy who championed this new "must do", I thought I would post an email I saved about this.

Things are progressing here, and I have what may be a stupid question, but I can't seem to find the answer via google or online help anywhere....

Lets assume that I ship the first release of this product I'm working on as a eclipse platform application, rather than an RCP. Given the numerous dependencies on EMF, GEF, GMF etc that I'll have how do I disable/remove their contributions to the File->New menu? My reasoning is that I really don't want to confuse the user with wizards they should not be looking at or using...

Any ideas on where I can look for examples on how to do this?


The obvious answer for the customer is to take advantage of capabilities in Eclipse. I know several teams have provided example capabilities, such as the platform and EMF, but they are just that, examples. Trying to get a set of working capabilities without the knowledge of how everyone's plug-ins and features fit together is not a fun task.

As part of our Galileo packages, wouldn't it be nice if we provided some out of the box, fully functioning capabilities to do just what our Eclipse customers are asking for. What parts should and should not be active when I am a C++ developer or a PDE developer? What are the advanced features? Do I need an extra capability to allow the end user to turn off the advanced features?

And by coming up with a proper set of capabilities, we will be able to do a little better job of integration testing and be able to turn off the tens of contributions to file -> new.