Hi Tom,
You've brought up some excellent questions. Some are going to require
time for reflection but I wanted to answer you immediately with some
initial thoughts.
Let me try to address them in turn, although I don't have answers for all
of them:
> I read many things about the e4 but I'm missing a strategic
> goal for e4.
The main goals for e4 are (in no particular order):
1. Make it easier to extend (use programmatically)
2. Make it easier to contribute to
3. Create a new technical foundation to ensure Eclipse remains
relevant into the future
4. Increase participation, ensure community remains vibrant,
diverse
Ok so those are pretty broad. We're presently going through a phase of
introspection ("What the heck is all this stuff we have doing anyway?",
"What are the long standing problems?", "What have we learned that we'd
like to do differently?"). Granted, much of that has been from a
technical perspective.
The simple answer is, "e4 is the next gen of the Eclipse platform. It
should be what people think it needs to be, and it will be what
participants make it." That makes messaging inherently vague. Right now
we're trying to understanding what people think it needs to be. Maybe you
have a certain vision and will influence that direction.
So far there's been some good discussion of the nature:
In what ways are we presently limiting the kinds of applications
you can use Eclipse for?
How do we see the audience changing? Is RCP becoming even more
relevant? What about the web?
Can we simplify the programming model?
Can we scale better?
Can we open up the language barrier to allow a wider audience for
writing Eclipse plugins? (Javascript being a start)
To what degree must we remain backwards compatible? How do we
innovate but do that at the same time?
One topic that we keep coming back to is better separation of
application/frameworks and presentation. Thus declarative styling via CSS,
XForms markup, modelling of the UI have all been hot topics. This will
enable RCP apps to apply proper branding, be less IDE'like, etc.
At the resource layer, there's been good discussion on allowing more
flexible resource layouts on disk, resources backed by databases, handling
very large resource sets, hiding projects from users, and on.
> 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.
Its true we've mostly been focused on the technical side, but well we're
mostly all technical guys! Your point is well taken.
Then again I don't know if we've ever known what Eclipse is or done a good
job at communicating that. The somewhat iconic expression "a framework
for everything and nothing in particular" comes to mind :)
> 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".
We should differentiate "development platform" meaning its an IDE vs. its
an application framework for building a wide variety of applications. We
want to reach a wider audience, both in terms of kinds of applications,
and kinds of programmers (skills required, language required). I agree
our "messaging" needs a lot of work. Its probably also true we haven't
been thinking of things in as much a strategic fashion as you're thinking.
> 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").
Some of that division is a result of the fact that Eclipse was an IDE
framework first, then an RCP platform after. As such, some of the dividing
lines were never clearly established. We're hoping to improve that in e4.
> 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.
This is definitely important for e4. We clearly need to enable a wider
range of applications, and correspondingly, user skills and interaction
styles. There've been some initial discussions on how to do this.
> 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.
Its an interesting idea but I wonder how we'd ever administer such a
thing.
Then again its difficult to design for reuse without knowing how something
is to be reused. Maybe folks coming forth with more interesting usage
scenarios will help drive this.
> 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.
No noise at all, great questions some of which I certainly hadn't
considered and others may not have.
I don't think I really satisfactorily answered all your questions. Perhaps
others could add more. I would like to view this as a start of a longer
conversation. Please continue to share your thoughts and questions. Its
a great form of particiation in e4. Welcome aboard! ;->
Best Regards,
Kevin McGuire_______________________________________________
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