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Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison


On 14 September 2016 at 15:55, Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

3. Not a product
True as well, in the sense that there is no proper product director/manager and product vision. This was mentioned before in this thread, see Doug's comments on "product focused organization", etc.

Yes. After I said that, I have volunteered to help facilitate the UX group sponsored by the Architecture Council. So I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I hope everyone here who has great opinions and ideas to move the vision for Eclipse forward will come help.

Doug.



That's a good effort, it has the potential to help a bit, but I wonder how far we that can take us. From my viewpoint, that still has two serious limitations:

A) Some UX issues/changes require a significant amount of coding work. Who is doing that, are you or you team also volunteering to do that work?

B) How much power will you actually have to actually influence UI? Consider for example Pascal's other post about improper context menu contributions from Egit and PDE. Ideally we'd just ask those teams to fix that, but what if they don't? - you asked yourself "what can we do if the third party isn¹t responsive? " ...

In IntelliJ all this core IDE functionality is developed by Jetbrains employees, so it's much easier for a product manager to fix this issues. There is a central authority with direct authority over everyone else involved.

That said, the menu issue is not that hard to get a consensus to fix. But let's imagine a more complex scenario.

Imagine you want the Eclipse IDE to have implicit-save, like IntelliJ (yes, one of my pet-peeves). That means
* auto-save is enabled by default.
* if you close an editor (or the whole IDE), the editor gets saved automatically, no user confirmation dialog appears.
* if you perform a launch operation, or a refactoring operation, the editors get saved automatically, no user confirmation dialog appears.
* there is no editor "dirty" UI indicator.
Let's ignore whether you actually agree or not if that is a worthwhile change. Let's just consider this issue: could you enforce this change? Could the Architecture Council enforce this change? Or would there need to be a consensus from all "involved parties"? And if so, who would those involved parties would be? What would the process be like?

My point is that if we need to get consensus from various people (from different organizations/project, with different goals, etc.), it will be very hard to enact significant change in the Workbench UI. We gotta try, but it's gonna be really hard.

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