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The Eclipse Marketplace concept fits well in the world of modularized and customizable applications. Apple has a marketplace, Google has a marketplace and many others too. Hence, the Eclipse Marketplace is a great addition for the Eclipse ecosystem. Moreover, it enables to setup a well designed patch and update strategy [1] for both community-driven as well as commercial RCP applications. But as soon as one needs a more fine-grained control of the plugins offered in the marketplace, an own solution is inevitable. An own marketplace allows you to control the set of offered plugins. Furthermore, you can then decide which plugins shall be delivered depending on the requesting RCP application. It gives you the control needed in a commercial environment, especially if the user shall be restricted to install well tested plugins only.

Thus the question is: How to implement such an own marketplace?

Principally, several XML files are delivered by the marketplace server containing additional information as for example the plugin description and its update site. Hence, any technology can be used to create such a marketplace server which is capable to write well formed XML files. I took the combination PHP/MySQL [2] as both technologies are commonly available in hosted environments. But instead of showing you specific PHP/MySQL functions, I'll give an overview which steps are necessary to create an own marketplace server and how to connect it to an RCP application independently of the used technology. After this session, you will have a well understanding of the marketplace principles. It is then an easy step to start an own marketplace server.

Philip Wenig