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[eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] Eclipse Definition & presenting e4

Hi all,

I'm really interested in the future of eclipse from a commercial adapter's
perspective. I read many things about the e4 but I'm missing a strategic
goal for e4.

The current situation is that it is very difficult to define Eclipse. If you
ask someone what Eclipse is, the most likely answer will be "A Java IDE".
Let me cite the first sentence of eclipse.org

"Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building
an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and
runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the
lifecycle."

I'm wondering if someone who has never heard "eclipse" before knows what
this sentence mean. In addition I cast doubt on the correctness of this
definition.

I think e4 is not only a new milestone for a technical platform, but also a
great opportunity to (re)define the scope of eclipse and its appended
communication. I cannot understand why eclipse is limited to a "development
platform".
For me as a "RCP evangelist" of non-technical applications it's sometimes
very difficult to argument the use of eclipse as an application framework
due to the missing of a (official) strategic adjustment regarding
application development with the RCP framework. In addition I often noticed
that the community still divides SDK- and RCP-Development, especially if it
comes to discussions about the Workspace-API, Resources or the IDE-bundle
(true to the maxim: "Either you develop tooling plugins for the SDK or a
RCP").

Another point is that many eclipse-projects cannot be reused in simple non
IDE RCP applications. That really hurts in Eclipse 3.x because I really like
the way eclipse behaves under the hood, but I don't like the complex UI
these projects provide (they are for nerds, not for non-techies), the
separation of "under-the-hood-functionalities" and the UI is mostly a
hopeless venture. On the other hand some projects (e.g. ECF) demonstrate
that such a separation is possible. The reuse of different components is an
important success-indicator; I'm sure that there are many developers that
would be happy if they could use the cool stuff other people develop in a
way where they don't need to suppress the debug-framework when they want to
use the Code-Highlighting of the xml-editor from WST (3.3). An orientation
like a "seal of RCP approval" would be very helpful.

But again: I have no clue about what the scope of e4, or even what e4 is
(the articles in the wiki handle very special things - no "meta-level"). -
Maybe the points I mentioned are absolutely irrelevant, if so, please excuse
the noise. 

Regards,

Tom Seidel, Dipl.-Ing. (BA) 
Technischer Leiter IT

Spirit Link GmbH
Paul-Gordan-Straße 13
91052 Erlangen, Germany
 
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