Eclipse Plug-In

[ogi]

As Collanos is based on the Eclipse Framework, it might be helpful, if you could run Collanos as an Plug-In for Eclipse. A lot of people develop in Eclipse and so they wouldn't have to have several Eclipse Frameworks in the background running (Eclipse consumes a lot of RAM). I think it wouldn't be to difficult to create such a version and it would give you access to all other Eclipse Plug-Modules like Subversion, ...

[Franco Dal Molin]

That's a great idea in principle and we have discussed it intenally already in the past. We came to the conclusion that we can not (yet) do it. There are a number or reasons:

- The Workplace uses the RCP framework quite intensively, but does so from a "self-standing" RCP app point of view - without considering any other uses. In other words, while we use Perspectives, Views, Status Bar, Splash, Icons, Initial Registration, Update Manager, Menus, and many more RCP features, it would require a very significant effort to make this work properly with the IDE and find a good way to combine the two worlds.
- The application is targeted at normal end-users and everything is made very simple and self-contained. If we integrated with an IDE, new requirements would come up immediately. Developers would want to share code, add features, have API's, share actions in other contexts, etc. This would end up becoming a totally different product.
- Unfortunately our resources are extrementy limited. So even if we would love to do so, we can simply not do it right now.

Collanos will evolve further and we plan to spearate the P2P Replication Engine and the Workspace Management from the actualy Eclipse UI in the near future. With an open API it will be much easier to call the services from different applications and UI's, including the Eclispe IDE.