Extension Manager

• UI
• Upgrade Farm In 5 Minutes
• Installed extensions
• Return back information to the server
• Virtual extensions as dependency
  • pom.xml extension
  • Find the extension
• Extension index
• Advanced repository search API
• Repositories
• Install an extension not coming from a repository
• New XWiki packaging format
• Social
• Misc
• Ideas (less obviously useful)
• Links and things to look at

Extension Manager already exist, you can see documentation about its current state on Extension Module.

This page is about future features and improvements of Extension Manager.

UI

ExtensionManagerUI

Upgrade Farm In 5 Minutes

ExtensionManagerUpgradeFarmIn5Minutes

Installed extensions

ExtensionManagerInstalledExtensions

Return back information to the server

The idea is to give some information to the server when it support it:

• extension has been installed succesfully
• extension installing failed
• extension has been uninstalled
• ...

Virtual extensions as dependency

Virtual extension are already implemented but one thing is missing: put virtual extension as dependency.

pom.xml extension

Define how to indicate a dependency that maven will obviously be unable to find itself.

Find the extension

Also need a way to find an extension by one of its supported features. Easy to add this in XWiki repository but not so much in maven repository where we can't easily search.

Extension index

ExtensionManagerIndexer

Advanced repository search API

ExtensionManagerSearch

Repositories

ExtensionManagerRepositories

Install an extension not coming from a repository

New XWiki packaging format

ExtensionManageXWikiPackage

Social

ExtensionManagerSocial

Misc

• add possibility to reinstall an extension (to restore it when a page has been removed by mistake or something like that)
• internationalize extension manager

Ideas (less obviously useful)

• add enable/disable extension support (XWIKI-5704)

Links and things to look at

• Debian Policy Manual and especially Declaring relationships between packages for inspiration
• Aether: official maven atifact resolving and dedpendency management library
• Apache Ivy: looks like groovy is using that as a library so could we (even if i could not find any reference to that on the Ivy website). It also supports maven so it could also be an alternative to Aether
• OSGi
• http://blog.caucho.com/tag/pomegranate/ (see also the comments at http://blog.caucho.com/?p=211)
• Apache ACE
• Commet to be used for question/answer UI