| [e4-dev] New code contribution to e4: Orion |
Dear e4 committers,
When the e4 project got started (this goes back to EclipseCon 2008 - almost three years ago), there was a discussion about a potential web-based Eclipse, and some prototype code was shown at one of the Birds-of-a-feather sessions. Soon after that, the discussion about this died down somewhat, and the cold reality set in of not being able to just wave a magic wand to move the existing Eclipse IDE to the web.
Recently, things started moving in this direction again. At IBM, members of the Eclipse Platform team (including myself) got the go ahead to invest in web-based development tooling. Today, we are contributing some code to the e4 incubator project, and will be developing it further in the e4 project. The intention is to grow this into a new project called "Orion" at Eclipse, together with others who would like to work with us on the vision, the architecture, and the code. We've already had a number of discussions with others in the Eclipse community who are interested in collaborating with us, but we'd love to hear from everybody, in particular from the existing e4 committers.
See also Mike Milinkovich's blog post: http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/mike/2011/01/11/introducing-orion/
The obvious question is what this will mean for Eclipse 3.x and 4.x. The answer is, not much. IBM is going to continue to invest in the existing Eclipse codebase, and help maintain the Eclipse Platform. Over time, 4.x is going to be the main development stream for the Eclipse Platform, and the 3.x version of the Workbench is going into maintenance mode. We've already talked a lot about being able to embed third-party web UI components in the existing Eclipse Workbench, on the desktop. Now we're going to build some of these web UI components ourselves. In other words, there is no common code between Eclipse 4.x and the new code contribution, but Eclipse 4.x will be the way to get integration between existing desktop Eclipse component, and new web UI components.
The contributed code is in two git repositories under e4 which can be accessed at:
http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/e4/org.eclipse.orion.client.git
http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/e4/org.eclipse.orion.server.git
Existing e4 committers have write access using:
ssh://username@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/gitroot/e4/org.eclipse.orion.client.git
ssh://username@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/gitroot/e4/org.eclipse.orion.server.git
The code in its current form cannot be run as is, instead we recommend you have a look at the wiki pages we created. We hope to have a snapshot build download soon so that you can run Orion locally.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Orion
Feel free to ask questions. I am sure there are many. You can also join the #eclipse-orion channel on http://wiki.eclipse.org/IRC.
Boris