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Our point is to write a business application. There's no concept of file, folders, or project in it. Eclipse has been designed to be extensible, and I think it is, but IMHO projects, files, folders and other IDE concerns shouldn't be tied so much to the Eclipse core. Maybe you could extract those into a common plugin that would be required by other IDE-oriented plugins. I find the following components very interesting with regard to business application development : Workbench, autoupdate, help, and swt (very fast, very pretty). I find the workbench UI interesting : perspective concept, dockable views, JFace framework... The business screen interoperability could be ensured by common underlying objects manipulated by the workbench and would be defined in our case as business entities (with their own icons ;). Eclipse would totally ROCK as an applicative platform if it weren't so tied to its IDE breed. I think i will definitely open a feature request :)
The platform core is divided into two main plugins: org.eclipse.core.resources, and org.eclipse.core.runtime. The resources plugin encapsulates all those IDE pieces you were referring to: IFile, IFolder, IProject, etc. This is already a seperable piece that is not strictly required for running the platform. Many of the UI pieces are also quite independent. SWT depends on nothing outside of itself. JFace depends only on SWT. The rest of the UI may have closer ties to the resources model, but I believe much of it is very neutral. Keeping the various pieces of the platform independent and generic (not IDE-centric) has been a strong requirement. I'll move this feature request to the UI component, so they can comment in more detail about how closely the UI is tied to the core resource model. It might be interesting for them to consider separating the UI into two plugins: the generic framework, and the IDE-specific views and pieces.
We have given some thought to this and the idea certainly has merit. However, the details are going to be tricky to work out. John is (almost) correct in his statement of JFace being only dependent on SWT. It is also dependent on Core for the progress monitoring API. Similiar dependencies will come up once we really try to make this happen. The standard components like the resource navigator, task list etc are very tied to the resource model and will not work without Core. The development team has no plans to make these changes in the near future. If you decide to go ahead please let us know about how successfull you were and the problems you encountered.
Consider as a post 2.0 enhancement
Reopen for investigation
The RCP work and Core split will address this
