Yup. 500 smackeroos in the form of U.S. dollars were handed to me yesterday by Google, Inc. via Western Union Money Transfer. I was pleased in the process.
Today, at the suggestion of Markus Kuppe (my other Summer of Code mentor), I tried to create extension points in my auto-configuration plugin so that other plugins could attach their "resource-finders" to mine. Hmm, this might need some explanation... Y'see, Eclipse has these things called extension points which are kinna like sockets where you can plug in extensions. My plugin (Eclipse autoconf) will eventually plug into Eclipse and provide an engine that executes resource discovery rules (here's a link to my proposal again just so you know what's going on). Other plugin writers, instead of rewriting service discovery routines, will simply be able to write some kind of simplified script that says things like "check here and here and here for so and so service". Now they can plug their plugin (technically, they'll write *another* plugin for this) into the extension points in mine, my autoconf plugin at the right time will execute their rules, and voila! the end user sees a list of all the binaries, ports etc. that he would have had to fill out otherwise automagically filled out. So, that's why today I worked on adding extension points today. I don't understand how to define XML Schema and this is apparently required to define extension points, so I'll try and figure it all out tomorrow.
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