Towards Dynamic Plug-in Replacement in Eclipse Plug-in Development

Although the Eclipse IDE offers an extremely useful built-in support for developing Eclipse plug-ins, it lacks the ability to perform dynamic updates of plug-ins in a running instance of the application being developed. Because of the nature of the Eclipse architecture and its strict class-loader delegation, plug-ins can only communicate through well-defined APIs. By applying a novel dynamic update approach to the eclipse plug-in development environment that exploits this knowledge, a new API are defined, namely the Dynamic API. This paper discusses some of the ordinary binary compatible changes that lead to erroneous program behaviour if not properly handled. Furthermore, it discusses how applying a dynamic update approach at development time gives developers a unique chance to experiment with dynamic updates without risking a costly shutdown of a real-life application.