Kevin McGuire

Eclipse UI Guy

Being less of an IDE will be a lot of work in e4!

There has been a growing discussion around the fact that Eclipse should look and behave less like an IDE. It was a recurring topic at the e4 Summit, and is a topic near to the hearts of many an RCP developer.

I came across the following help documentation while working on 3.4 help context IDs, this is from org.eclipse.platform.doc.user contexts_Workbench.xml (shows up in Preferences->General->Workspace):

<context id=”workspace_preference_page_context”>
<description>
This preference page is used to set the IDE-specific preferences settings related in workspace.
</description>
</context>

This description made sense during Eclipse 1.0 (probably when it was written) but for any RCP app that wants to reuse this rather general preference page its a real problem. While so far we’ve been focused on the architecture and API, this IDE/non-IDE split will surface in a surprising number of places. How do you reuse Help doc when you don’t know the context of usage?

Hmmm, this is going to be even tougher than I thought!

Posted May 30th, 2008 by Kevin McGuire in category: Uncategorized
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