Re: [europa-build-workshop] CBI

["Nick Boldt" <codeslave@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Seems I need to read my mail more often. ;-) Some replies in no particular order:

a) donating EMFT/MDT/Modeling common build infra to Eclipse as part of some new project for which I'd be a committer. I'm in. Doesn't sound a lot different from what I do already, since everything I do is open source. I guess the only difference is that it'll be a single project instead of a dozen (7 web projects (incl. two leftover *-home ones) + 5 releng projects). I'll have to update bug 
157931, but I'm cool with that. ;-P

b) Flash... sucks. As someone who's used it from versions 4 through the first MX release, saw the birth of actionscript and its evolution into something vaguely OO (though the syntax was pretty fugly), I've done some pretty cool things with Flash (few are still online except this 
http://www.rubiks.com/lvl4/commun/cbegam/games/clock/clock.html), but IMHO Flash is about fashion, not about function. Sure, Flash and actionscript now integrate nicely with databases (provided you have some CGI mechanism in place) and finally got around to building consistent widget sets for forms and other standard UI, but you can do the same with PHP, JSP, ASP, and every other web-friendly scripting language out there. If we want to spend time making a sexy UI for things (beyond just making things Phoenixy?) then I'd suggest spending time on GWT rather than Flash, but that'll require running Tomcat (or another JSP stack) on 
build.eclipse and frankly I don't see the point. Forgive me if that sounds harsh, that's just my $0.02.

c) common vs. custom is a standard issue with providing a template-based set of tools. Look at Phoenix itself, then look at how the Modeling project or the Platform has expanded on the CSS and done some cool things with it. You provide a framework, then people customize from there. Same's true for this mysterious CBI we'd all like to see. For EMFT, currently ten projects, there's a fair amount of standardization of releng code, and there's some additional tweaks on a per-project basis (3rd party code, javadoc, namespaces, ... see the EMFT_Procedures doc in the Wiki for more). With Modeling/EMF/EMFT, the intent is to have one consistent website and set of web & releng tools but that's not completely possible (?) since every project has its own particular quirks, like EMF currently including XSD in its builds despite it now being an MDT project, or having old release notes from before we had a database solution. We keep moving closer to a one-stop-shop solution but there's still places where we've standardized the way we extend rather than making everyone fit into the same box. Think extension points and plugins. ;-)

d) in a different thread Denis asked me "how close are we to having an install script for a CBI on eclipse.org?" The answer to that is that now that the server is ready to roll with php5 and mysql5, I can START moving code from 
emft.eclipse and emf.torolab to build.eclipse, merging and replacing bits as I go. The current plan is to get UML2 Tools building as the first Modeling Build, then slowly migrate the remaining EMFT projects, UML2 UML, and finally EMF into that common infrastructure. Bear in mind that there's a lot of web UI for running shell tasks that has het to be designed, much less coded, so this won't happen overnight. Note also that since I'm a stickler for documentation (in case that wasn't obvious by now) I intend to document the setup of the server so that it can then later be turned into a setup script (ie., from textual instructions into shell scripted code). This includes things like 
164516 for configuring mysql with timezone support.

Cheers,

Nick