The 1.0 release will be a release with minimal release which will allow users to sync content between their IDE and the repository. Also see the Sling IDE tooling Use Cases page for a list of use cases we want to support, either in the initial or in the subsequent releases.
See also the Moving forward with IDE tooling discussion on the Sling dev mailing list for a more in-depth discussion on some of the technical issues.
Our IDE tooling should not focus on a single IDE and the naming should reflect that. Possible names
We will aim to support Eclipse and IntelliJ with a first 1.0 release.
The core services will be IDE-agnostic and aim to support all platforms. As such, they will be constrained to not use specific APIs. Eclipse mandates that all I/O operations be done using its resource layer.
The server control service will handle communication with a Sling Launchpad instance, including
The way resources are serialized to disk is outside the scope of the Transport API. As such, we need to define a standard serialization format.
One serialization format is defined by VLT
.content.xml
for all nodes which have attributes which are not representable with files and directoriesThis may or may not be the ideal format for our IDE tooling. One serious drawback is that 'dot-files' are hidden by default in IDEs and the command-line. Auto-sync is also not possible for .content.xml files for now , possibly for performance reasons
We can ( and probably should ) define our own resource serialization format. One proposal is
Contains the APIs needed to connect to Sling launchpad and import/export content.
File vault is in process of being donated to to ASF and is a good candidate for a transport implementation.
Pros
Cons
The current implementation is based on the Sling DefaultGetServlet and DefaultPostServlet and is another candidate for a transport implementation.
Pros
Cons
Include a basic resource editor which works with the files defined by our serialization format.
We will inherit some code from the current implementation, and need to work out a way to export content from the repository into the workspace with the proposed UI flow.
Once we have the content module nailed down we can focus on deploying Java code changes quickly into a Sling launchpad, using a bundle module.
One possibility is reusing the Eclipse Libra stuff. However, AFAIK Libra works with Apache Felix, not over JCR, and this can be problematic.
Another possibility is to mount a virtual FS provider at /system/ide/install
and mount each target directory at /system/ide/install/(bundle-symbolicname)-(version).jar using a custom resource provider . The jar can be refreshed on each incremental change.
Bonus points for (somehow?) refreshing only java classes or only affected SCR components. An idea is to use a special /META-INF/last-session-changes.xml file which records what files have changed ; this file is only available when generated by the IDE ( maven plugin? ) and the JCR installer ( or someone else ) is smart enough to take it into account.
If there is interest, we can also build a CLI-only implementation, although for the initial release we can defer to the vlt command-line tool.
Instant feedback on changes
These mockups are based on a work-in-progress version of Slingclipse. Since it doesn't actually work I haven't pushed it to SVN yet.