[nebula-dev] On the state and future of Nebula - Part 1

[Tom Schindl <listom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nebula-Community,

This is a multi series on my view of the state and future of Nebula
which has the target get us out of the nebula.

Part 1: The mission statement and its consequences
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I just replied to a newsgroup thread which asks whether the Nebula-Grid
will get part of SWT one day and hence out of Alpha/Beta state.

While answering the question I some things got to my mind. I would like
to rephrase them here and ask for your comments.

The first thing that I realized is that our main problem in the past was
and still is our mission statement.

"The Nebula project is a source for custom SWT widgets and other UI
components. Nebula is also an incubator for SWT. Some Nebula widgets
will graduate into SWT and therefore into the main Eclipse Platform."

Though this statement may not sound new to you I think many of our
problems stem from it.

a) It makes Nebula look like a playground for big boys and girls for the
   outside user

b) It doesn't reflect reality because our controls will never get part
   of SWT because the main purpose of SWT is to work with widget
   provided by the Native Platforms

c) It makes us Nebula-Developers unconsciously work as we are not
   working towards a stable widget (even if it means to hold of new
   features until we have a release)

So the first thing we need to fix is our mission statement. What to you
guys think about the following mission statement:

"Nebula is a place where different Eclipse-Projects and Independent
developers collaborate on building Custom SWT widgets and reuseable
UI-Components useable in UI-Applications built using SWT."

Some of the latest additions we added to Nebula (e.g. XViewer) fall
directly into this category of reusable UI-Components. The above is a
first try to cover the new scope and mission of our Nebula-Project!

Naturally I'd like to get response on the statement and your idea of the
mission of Nebula so that we come up with a mission statement within the
next say 2 weeks.

Thanks

Tom