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[e4-dev] Introduction for e4 committer nomination
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Hi,
Following a bug discussion and some patches I proposed, Boris Bokowski
proposed to nominate me as an E4 committer to allow me to contribute
more easily in the future. See
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=317706#c18
I appreciate the proposal as I am getting more and more involved with
E4. With this mail, I introduce myself and describe the areas I'd be
interested working on. Sorry for the length of this mail, feel free to
jump to the next part.
--------
About me
--------
Some of you might know me by my numerous questions (and occasional
answers) on IRC where I'm using the handle 'magnet', or by my bug reports...
My name is Simon Chemouil and I live in Toulouse, France. I've been an
Eclipse user since 2002 and became more active in the Eclipse in 2008
when I started an internship as an RCP/Plugin developer at Anyware
Technologies (now Sierra Wireless), an Eclipse Foundation solution
member where I worked with some Eclipse Modeling committers (Ecore Tools
incubator), including some you may know like David Sciamma, Jacques
Lescot and Benjamin Cabé.
After this internship and the subsequent acquisition of Anyware by
Sierra Wireless, I moved to another company, ARTAL Technologies which is
a middle sized technology company that's a subcontractor to many big
industrial groups (EADS, Thales, ...).
I work here as a RCP developer and after a RCP 3.x-based prototype I
proposed using E4 as our framework for a strategic application for one
of our clients (that I can't name here, but would provide some serious
credibility to E4 were to project to succeed, and it's looking good so
far). I'm technical lead for a 4 developers team focused on building
this application (we're tapping into a much larger ecosystem with legacy
components, so the team outside RCP development is much bigger).
Choosing E4 at the stage we did might seem crazy but it worked out well
so far and things are looking good because the situation tends to
improve, we have fewer hurdles now and the team is getting used to the
framework. E4 is a bliss to develop with! I don't know but we might be
the first "industrial" E4 application and we are planning to ship at the
end of the year (I hope we can demo it at the EclipseCon 2011).
-----------------
Areas of interest
-----------------
There are a few kinds of contributions I plan to make to E4:
(1) Making sure things work for our application
- We're heavy OSGi users: declarative services, dynamically
registered/unregistered services, etc. It has to work, hence my work
with @Dynamic annotation.
- General E4 bug fixes
- Deployment stuff (using E4 in a tycho/mavenized environment, etc)
- UI stuff (making splash screens work in pure E4 apps for
instance, not sure it has been fixed)
(2) Sharing some common infrastructure we develop for our application
- I want to make sure basic "RCP" elements are available in
E4-Pure mode. I'd like to work on a pure E4 Common Navigator Framework,
Log view, Property views and provide 3.x-dependency-free versions of
some APIs like Eclipse Forms. We already started some work on these
aspects. I believe the incubator would be a great place for this.
Ideally, I'd like to make RCP developers not think twice about choosing
E4 now because "some components" are not available.
(3) Scala-related contributions
- I'm a Scala enthusiast and a passive member of the Scala
community for years now (mostly bug reports and help on the IRC channel).
- I'd want to make sure E4 programming can be pleasant in Scala
and if required provide a thin scala-wrapper for some parts (following
the "pimp my library" scala pattern).
- I'm interested in the recent announcement to open JDT to new
Java-like languages in the E4 incubator, but I don't know to which
extend I could contribute there
(4) General documentation
- Probably more samples, blogging about E4 features and interested
code patterns, E4 advocacy
- Wiki updates / contributions (did a few already)
--------------------
Short term TODO List
--------------------
Improving / maintaining a clean way to get dynamic OSGi services,
whether through the @Dynamic annotation or another way to be defined
--> adding a way to specify OSGi filters to the annotation
--> provide the host bundle's BundleContext in EclipseContexts created
for UI objects
I'm starting to get a good grasp at E4's internals and I think my
situation as a 3rd-party E4 user makes me a good candidate to provide
documentation, fixes for different use cases and share components. It
also guarantees a long term involvement.
Cheers,
--
Simon
