Hi Yves, Hallvard, and everybody else,
Thank you for the interesting discussion so far. :-)
A couple of comments:
1. We don't need to pick a "winner" or a "loser". It is perfectly fine to
develop technologies in parallel, in fact having some competition as to who
solves a problem best is probably good (for some time). For any component
in the e4 project, there are several possible exit strategies (ignoring
obvious ones like "stop working on it"): graduate by merging it into the
Eclipse SDK, graduate within the e4 project, or graduate by moving to
another host project. Just to give concrete examples for the last option,
Nebula would probably be a good host project for XWT, and perhaps PMF would
be a good host project for TM.
2. Fragmentation is not good, in the long term. If after careful
consideration, the differences between XWT and TM turn out to be minor, or
just a matter of personal taste, it would be preferable to make an attempt
at merging the two. Clients will be confused as to which one they should
choose. I don't know the technical details, but if both TM and XWT provide
a 1:1 mapping to SWT widgets, shouldn't it be possible to have a 1:1
mapping between TM's EMF model and XWT's XML files? It looks like
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=260289 is a good starting
point for investigating this.
3. Real clients are more important than theoretical advantages of one
technology over the other. Based on my limited knowledge on who uses which
framework, Wazaabi seems to be ahead of both TM and XWT at this point, but
I'd love to be proven wrong...
4. A few of the comments in this discussion came across as being protective
of your respective technology, and not as cooperative as I would like them
to be. Furthermore, both XWT and TM currently score pretty low on the
"committer diversity scale". It would be so much better if you could
combine your efforts and build something that is greater than what could be
built by just one of the parties involved.
5. Independent of this discussion and whether consensus can be achieved, I
agree with McQ that pluggability is a good thing. I wouldn't want to see
anything in the e4 Workbench code that makes it easier to use one
declarative UI toolkit over another. It should be equally easy to
contribute views, editors, dialogs, preference pages etc. whether they are
written by hand, or built using TM, XWT, Wazaabi, PMF, or other such
frameworks.
Btw, there will be an e4 Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe (Ludwigsburg,
Germany, October 27-29):
http://www.eclipsecon.org/summiteurope2009/sessions/sessions?id=981
Hope to see you there!
Boris
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