| Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] How many pieces for the workbench? |
> This is great and very powerful and I believe that even though the goal
> is to recreate a workbench with functionalities equivalent to those
> of the previous
> one, we should strive to keep this nice separation of concern to give
> ppl the ability to write the smallest application possible and also give
> them the ability to use just what they need. For example an
> application author
> could pick and choose workbench constructs by just adding a few more
> plug-ins (view support should be separate from the editor support, etc.).
> Likewise, if he wants extensibility for views, he could just
> drop a few additional plug-ins.
>
> Do we believe this is an interesting direction and we should strive to
> keep this kind of separation?
+1 - thanks for bringing this aspect to our attention.
I think we should try to do a much better job at componentizing the Workbench (and everything else...) this time around. I agree with you that the code dealing with extensibility should be in a separate plug-in because there are RCP applications that are "just" closed applications, not extensible platforms. Also, like you suggest, the editor management code (editor inputs, managing the editor open/save/close lifecycle, etc) could be in a separate plug-in.
It is probably worth starting a wiki page on this, listing aspects of the Workbench that should be in their own plug-ins. Please add content to: http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Componentization
Boris.