Hi all, I'm really interested in the future of eclipse from a commercial adapter's perspective. I read many things about the e4 but I'm missing a strategic goal for e4.
The current situation is that it is very difficult to define Eclipse. If you ask someone what Eclipse is, the most likely answer will be "A Java IDE". Let me cite the first sentence of eclipse.org "Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle." I'm wondering if someone who has never heard "eclipse" before knows what this sentence mean. In addition I cast doubt on the correctness of this definition. I think e4 is not only a new milestone for a technical platform, but also a great opportunity to (re)define the scope of eclipse and its appended communication. I cannot understand why eclipse is limited to a "development platform". For me as a "RCP evangelist" of non-technical applications it's sometimes very difficult to argument the use of eclipse as an application framework due to the missing of a (official) strategic adjustment regarding application development with the RCP framework. In addition I often noticed that the community still divides SDK- and RCP-Development, especially if it comes to discussions about the Workspace-API, Resources or the IDE-bundle (true to the maxim: "Either you develop tooling plugins for the SDK or a RCP"). Another point is that many eclipse-projects cannot be reused in simple non IDE RCP applications. That really hurts in Eclipse 3.x because I really like the way eclipse behaves under the hood, but I don't like the complex UI these projects provide (they are for nerds, not for non-techies), the separation of "under-the-hood-functionalities" and the UI is mostly a hopeless venture. On the other hand some projects (e.g. ECF) demonstrate that such a separation is possible. The reuse of different components is an important success-indicator; I'm sure that there are many developers that would be happy if they could use the cool stuff other people develop in a way where they don't need to suppress the debug-framework when they want to use the Code-Highlighting of the xml-editor from WST (3.3). An orientation like a "seal of RCP approval" would be very helpful. But again: I have no clue about what the scope of e4, or even what e4 is (the articles in the wiki handle very special things - no "meta-level"). - Maybe the points I mentioned are absolutely irrelevant, if so, please excuse the noise. Regards, Tom Seidel, Dipl.-Ing. (BA) Technischer Leiter IT Spirit Link GmbH Paul-Gordan-Straße 13 91052 Erlangen, Germany phone +49(0) 9131 97792-0 fax +49(0) 9131 97792-57 mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] web http://www.spiritlink.de map http://www.spiritlink.de/map.asp Geschäftsführer: Markus Hanauer, Gunther Tutein, Fabian Schneider Handelsregister Fürth, HRB 7533 _______________________________________________ eclipse-incubator-e4-dev mailing list [email protected] https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse-incubator-e4-dev
