Faceted Project Framework is a mature component of Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) that facilitates treating Eclipse projects as composed of units of functionality (called facets) that can be easily added or removed by users. This is a proposal to move this framework from WTP to a standalone project so that it can be accessed by Eclipse Projects that do not have a natural dependency on WTP.
The Faceted Project Framework is a proposed open-source project under the Eclipse Development Process, and will incubate under the top-level Technology project. This proposal is posted here to solicit community feedback and additional project participation. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.fproj newsgroup.
The Faceted Project Framework project would be chartered with making it possible for developers to build modular projects where functionality can be easily added and removed by the user in a standard way. It will further be charted with providing the integration story between Faceted Project Framework and other technologies at Eclipse in situations where doing so would substantially broaden the applicability of the framework.
Here are some of the key requirements:
The project would be initially composed of two components:
Faceted Project Framework leverages Resources and UI frameworks from Eclipse Platform. Facets provide a functional superset over Project Natures (part of the Eclipse Platform Resources). Projects taking advantage of the Faceted Project Framework can choose to rely solely on it or mix facets and natures. The mixing scenario is particularly important in cases where an existing code base already uses natures and backwards compatibility needs to be maintained. In those situation facets can serve as wrappers around natures.
There is a possibility that a deeper integration with Eclipse Platform will happen as there has been some interest from the E4 project.
JDT Enablement component leverages various API provided by the JDT project.
WTP would be the main consumer of artifacts produced by this project for immediate future.
The initial code contribution will come from Eclipse Web Tools Platform project.
WTP, Eclipse IAM
Developers who start out leveraging this framework might eventually contribute bug fixes and features.
This project will not provide functionality that can be directly consumed by end-users. Users of this project will be developers at other Eclipse Projects as well as developers in the broader Eclipse Community.
The first release of this project will be aggressively scheduled to line up with Galileo Simultaneous Release (June 2009). The primary goals of the first release will be to (a) refactor code contribution from WTP into project's namespace, (b) eliminate several years worth of deprecated API from the code base, and (c) other work necessary to get established as an independent project.
Concurrently with the above work, a change will be prepared to alter the version of the Faceted Project Framework in WTP to become a shell that delegates to the new framework. It is absolute requirement that the existing API is not broken and continues to behave as before. This will be verified both via automated tests as well as via in-depth manual tests. Any interested adopters will be given this patch if they wish to test in the context of their products. The precise details and time of adoption of this project by WTP will be worked out by WTP. Note that adoption can only happen once this project has exited incubation.