Thursday, January 12, 2006

When seamless integration becomes a nightmare...

Eclipse is a great integration platform. There are many plugins that work together very nicely. As a user you don't have to worry where a menu item, a new wizard, a preference page, a view or an editor, etc comes from. You install a plugin (or add-in or extension) , and it's integrated. Great!

However, the dark side is, that it's very hard to figure out what a particular "plugin" is contributing to eclipse. Just make the experiment: install 30 plugins you have never used before from eclipse-plugins.info into your eclipse installation. Now you have new views, editors, context menu entries, toolbar items, menu items, new wizard items, export/import wizard entries, preference pages, perspectives, help pages, cheat sheets, property pages, keyboard shortcuts, perspectives... But you have no idea which contribution belongs to which plugin. But without a map in your mind what a particular plugin is contributing it is very hard to use and it's hard to understand what to expect from a new plugin.

My personal strategy is to install plugins one by one into a well known eclipse environment. I take some time trying to figure out what the contributions of a plugin are. That's tough enough for me as an experienced eclipse user. It must be a nightmare for someone who starts using eclipse, because he typically starts with a "product" that consists of a set of pre-installed plugins (just like installing 30 plugins at once)... I also install each "plugin" in its own eclipse extension location so I can easily uninstall it later (but that's another story). Really problematic are contributions to wizard pages and context menus of some objects in tree views. Unless you have selected the right obeject you don't see the contribution. I often install a plugin and then I ask myself: "And now? How do I find out where it contributes?". This is particularly problematic with small not well documented plugins: I install it and I have no clue where search for its contributions.

What could be done to help users identifying the things that have been added by a plugin? Maybe a kind of plugin inspector (feature inspector), that lists in a view all the contributions of a plugin (feature, add-in, extenison).

Windows highlights newly installed programs in the start menus. Maybe there could be a setting to highlight the contributions of a particular feature.

Any ideas how to solve the problem?

3 comments:

  1. That would actually be a pretty good diagnostic tool. If you could scan the extension registry or even pick out well know base extensions and contributions you could provide a list of what a plugin contributes. This is only useful for those plugins that use extension points for contributions.

    Bob

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  2. Interesting topic. I like the menu highlight idea. We are currently looking at creating small screen casts and popping it into an intro view to describe changes we introduce via new plug-ins in our commercial application. However, I think any platform support along these lines would be a welcome addition for end users.

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  3. For developers, PDE could be of help for new plugin(s) introspection.

    For users, ... It's quite another story. :)

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