New home for GWT Eclipse Plugin

[Colin Alworth]

The GWT Eclipse Plugin has become unmaintained, and over the last several months several community members have stepped up to update it to run on recent Eclipse versions, and support the new GWT groupId.

As part of that process, we've created a new marketplace entry, and while it is still pointed at the old 3.0 release, we're preparing a new release, and hope to have it out within a week.

https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/gwt-plugin/

In order to deploy a new version, we need to deploy the unpacked repository somewhere - which rules out a maven repository. The footprint of the unpacked workspace is fairly large, around 350mb, which would be too big for github pages after three releases. We could still deploy releases zips, but need somewhere else to put the unpacked content.

There is probably another clever solution, but the straightforward solution seems to be to add a subdomain on gwtproject.org and unpack the content there - I propose eclipse.gwtproject.org. As we did for www.gwtproject.org and samples.gwtproject.org, I've put an example of this at eclipse.gwtproject.org.vertispan.com, and deployed a single snapshot of the 4.0 plugin (note that as with many eclipse plugin repos, this doesn't load correctly in a browser):

https://eclipse.gwtproject.org.vertispan.com/2023-01-18/

If there are no objections, once we've finished the 4.0 plugin and are ready for a release, I'll formally set up eclipse.gwtproject.org. For the moment I anticipate only a plugins/ directory, with each versioned release (and maybe a nightly build setup too), to allow for additional content later.

Using the gwtproject.org domain name seems natural as a large number of GWT developers use Eclipse and this plugin, and the documentation at gwtproject.org has long since offered Eclipse instructions, with little space given to IntelliJ or Maven/Gradle. I'd further propose we should improve that situation, but that's a separate discussion. Vertispan intends to host this new plugin content, and we are already hosting the gwtproject.org domain content.

If there are reservations about gwtproject.org also hosting the eclipse plugin, we can set up an alternate domain name for this work, though at least for the time being, Vertspan will be hosting these together.

[Jens]

Seems fine to use the gwtproject.org domain for it. I slightly tend towards plugins.gwtproject.org/eclipse because it is slightly more descriptive and then we could also provide plugins.gwtproject.org/browser-extensions to publish the last working classic dev mode browser extensions for people having such an old setup. Currently they are all hosted on google.com domain (see: https://www.gwtproject.org/missing-plugin/) and might disappear at any time.

As there was some trouble getting access to the marketplace maybe in the long run some mechanisms should be put into place to avoid that situation in the future. For example some online password manager with password sharing between trustworthy community members. I appreciate the commitment of Vertispan but there should be a backup plan in case something unexpected happens.

-- J.

[Colin Alworth]

The marketplace entry is updated, and is using the 4.0.0 release at plugins.gwtproject.org. There is a subdirectory that lists all deployed versions, including a nightly build - each of these directories can be added directly to eclipse as an update site: https://plugins.gwtproject.org/eclipse/gwt-eclipse-plugin/.

This deployment is managed presently by https://github.com/Vertispan/gwtproject.org.

[Vassilis Virvilis]

thanks for that.

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Vassilis Virvilis