Continuum Eclipse Plugin proposal

0) Overview
--------------
The document is a proposal for Continuum Eclipse Plugin for participation in
Google's Summer Of Code 2006 program.

1) Project Title
-----------------
Continuum Eclipse Plugin.

2) Synopsis
--------------
The project aims to develop an extension/plugin to the Eclipse IDE to allow
Build and Release managers to be able to manage their projects builds on a
remote Continuum instance via this plugin.

3) Scope
-----------
For the purpose of SOC submission, the scope of requirements for the
Continuum-Eclipse-plugin is limited to as below:
3-1) Allow setup of connection profiles to multiple Continuum instances.
3-2) Display list of currently added Maven projects.
3-3) Allow user to ADD/EDIT/DELETE a Maven project.
3-4) Allow user to trigger/force a manual build for a Project.
3-5) Allow user to ADD/VIEW/EDIT build definitions for a selected Maven
project.
3-6) Provide a user-friendly interface to enable user to set up a Cron-based
schedule for a build.
3-7) Obtain build results for a given project build.

4) Project Details
--------------------
Apache Continuum is a Continous Integration server that enables automated or
manual continous builds for projects. Continuum installation currently exposes
a web-based interface to the user for management purposes. However, it is
expected that an Eclipse plugin would bring the Continuum management relatively
'closer' to the user and provide a feature rich interface to interact with
Continuum server.

The underlying principle is to exploit the SOAP-based interfaces exposed by
Continuum APIs to remote calls from within the proposed Eclipse Plugin on a
Continuum instance.

Certain tasks can be accomplised at the client-end with minimal or no
round-trips over the wire. For instance:
4-1) Validation of SCM URL information in pom.xml
4-2) Required fields/data can be validated on the client before a SOAP
request is initiated.
4-3) Enable users to create scheduling rules easily (Quartz?)
4-4) Enable User/Group/Project/Build management from within Eclipse.
4-5) Enable uploading pom.xml

5) Schedule
--------------
Project schedules might be impacted by Google's acceptance and number of
students available to work on the project. Assuming a period of 2 months
(July & August), it is proposed to keep iterations short (~10 days).

Ground work on requirements, use-cases and design could be done before the
acceptance to give the project a head start.

Discuss with Continuum team

6) Bibliography
-----------------
Apache Continuum Website http://maven.apache.org/continuum/

7) Revision History
--------------------
22/04/2006 RT Initial Draft
22/04/2006 RT Fixed bullets.
02/05/2006 RT Moved proposal to docs.codehaus.org