[eclipse.org-membership-at-large] Two Project Declarations

[Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

As per the Eclipse Development Process, we are notifying the Eclipse Membership-at-Large of the intent of Zend and IBM to propose the "PHP-IDE" Tools project and of Compuware to propose the "Tools Services Framework (Corona)" Technology project.

Brief descriptions of the two projects are below. 

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Project Declaration for "PHP-IDE"

The PHP IDE project will deliver a PHP Integrated Development Environment framework for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass the development components necessary to develop PHP-based Web Applications and will facilitate extensibility. It will leverage the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.

The project will contribute an initial set of Eclipse plug-ins that will add PHP IDE capabilities to Eclipse, and will provide APIs to further extend the functionality of the project. The project will be composed of a set of extensible features covering the development life cycle of PHP including functionality that deals with developing, deploying, documenting, debugging and testing PHP-based applications.

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Project Declaration for "PHP-IDE"

The success of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) has led to a number of requirements for functionality that enables integrations across multiple RCP instances. Eclipse plug-in tools and RCP applications are frequently used by development teams and other organizational units who could benefit from additional collaboration capabilities among Eclipse client environments enabled by a central shared context. As the Eclipse ecosystem grows to support a broader set of tools, it would be advantageous to have a framework for hosting plug-ins that supports tool integrations in a shared context.

Corona will provide frameworks that are required for collaboration among RCP instance based tools and those that exist outside the RCP environment. The Corona project will include:

• A service plug-in model based on OSGi and hosted within a generic ESB container. The initial deployment targets are the ones supported by the SOA Tools Project.

• Extension points that facilitate the creation a wide variety of plug-ins.

• An implementation of extensions for collaboration concepts that are analogous to applicable RCP concepts such as Projects and Natures. For example, a shared Project would implement a container for associated Project repositories and would host ad hoc collaboration via ECF between project members as defined by Higgins.