Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4 probably too late?

[Steve Northover <Steve_Northover@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Please
can anyone comment of my concerns about SWT future (I mean basic UI rendering
layer for E4). 

Today's GUI landscape is fragmented.
 The SWT port to Dojo, Flex and Silverlight is only a small part of
e4.  Go ahead and use whatever technology you want to drive Eclipse
4.0, including the ones you have mentioned.

If you are interested in helping us
take SWT forward, jump in there and help out.  The prototype code
has a portable for API for animation and effects.

Andrey Platov <andrey@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: eclipse-incubator-e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

04/12/2008 07:41 PM

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Subject	[eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4 probably too late?

Hi folks,

Few weeks passed after EclipseCon but I'm still under E4 impression. I
saw excited people around applauding demos of scripts, which changes caption
color. I saw full room of people excited with demo of the editor on the
web, and I believe many of them left EclipseCon feeling bright Eclipse
future. I have heard from E4 gang "we do not know details but it will
be cool", and I believe E4 will be cool. There was questions about
3.5, diversity, and technical problems (like event handing), but to the
best of my knowledge no one asked E4 gang: "guys, why do you so happy?
do not you think E4 is very late?.. probably too late". 

As for me - I left EclipseCon with dark thoughts about Eclipse future.
There are two names made me unhappy: WPF and JavaFX. Nevertheless I'm aware
of WPF and JavaFX exists I did not paid attention to them. After I looked
I was shocked. Both WPF and JavaFX very similay and both are definitely
new way to develop UIs. And SWT (as well as "classic" component
based OS UIs) is far away. I'm afraid many eclipse developers did not looked
into WPF or JavaFX deep. Personally I was thinking about them like declarative
UI languages and corresponding frameworks - nothing new comparing to DHTML/Scripting
for example. But I was totally wrong - they definitely rethinked how UIs
shall be build. After looking inside I started trust Sun/MS marketing people
and believe that any of these two technologies can start new age for UI
development. 

For me eclipse is everything during past 5 years, my work, my hobby, my
hopes... I can find everything I need in eclipse world. If I can't find
anything I can develop it. After looked at JavaFX/WPF - I can't imaging
anything better, but I can't have such technologies in my eclipse-oriented
world. Most disappointing to my totally eclipsed mind that I can have them
now, but out of eclipse. In 2008 I can start programming with WPF/JavaFX
and provide UI designer with top-notch tooling. While E4 is just an incubation
community-driven project at warming up stage, well funded and formed teams
at Sun and Microsoft worked hard on new UI development concepts for past
*years*. They done, E4 did not started. 

Folks, we talking about to run E4 on desktop OSes and web runtimes such
as Flash, they own that runtimes (Java and WPF/Silverlight); we talking
about new programming models for UI; they own new technologies introducing
new programming concepts for UI (JavaFX Script and WPF/XAML) and these
programming models doing a lot intersting things in terms of databinding,
event processing, UI composition, rendering, and performance optimizations
- E4 did not face that problems in practice yet. We predict to have something
(hope "something" will include great UI tooling) in 2010 - Sun
and Microsoft releasing tools for their technologies in 2008 (upcoming
JavaFX design tools, which will be interoperable with Adobe products, and
Microsoft _expression_ WPF tooling).

I did shared my concerns with a friend (who is an eclipse committer). I
told, hey I'm frustrating how eclipse is far from what I saw in WPF and
JavaFX. The answer was: It's OK - Eclipse is a conservative platform...
This is contrary to my understanding of Eclipse during past years - I was
thinking Eclipse is an innovative platform...

5 years ago SWT was a best choise for me: it was much rich compating to
AWT and much faster comparing to early Swing. Now SWT looks like dinosaur
comparing to WPF and JavaFX. Do you think it's possible to jump into this
running train? 

Please can anyone comment of my concerns about SWT future (I mean basic
UI rendering layer for E4). 

Will be there a switch to JavaFX? If not - do you think there can be enough
resources involved to catch JavaFX/WPF with alternative but comparable
technology (New SWT) and relevant tooling? 


Kind Regards,
Andrey Platov
Eclipse DLTK Project Lead



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