[wtp-dev] poor man's introduction to eclipse 4.0

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Earlier today I agreed to post some
information about Eclipse 4.0. Last I heard, they are still planning an
"Early Adopter" release the end of July (RC1 is this week). 

As discussed in status meetings, the
hope is that in WTP 3.3 our plugins will work with both 4.1 and 3.7 (both
planned for June, 2011, as far as I know). 

I'm no expert, and there's probably
better information out there, but here's a quick list of info and links.


So what is it? Basically Eclipse 4.0
is Eclipse 3.6 + some e4 graduating plugins, one or two "workbench"
bundles (changed from 3.x stream) plus some additional "prereqs"
(e.g. EMF) plus some additional 3rd party jars ... mostly related to CSS,
I think ... and a "compatibility" bundle, which is what allows
"3.x" code to run with Eclipse 4.0. Well, assuming the "3.x"
code is written strictly to 3.x API.  

See some "new and noteworthy"
http://download.eclipse.org/e4/downloads/drops/S-1.0M6-201005232015/e4-news-M6.html

See http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Self_Hosting

for both "how to" information,
where to see and open bugs, etc., and very importantly, see the list of
bugs and limitations there. 
(I know I would have been less surprised,
at its current state and abilities, if I had read that list first). 

I would not recommend using with your
production workspaces, right now. I've not heard of any damaging problems
... but, a cautionary copy is probably good. 

Downloads for Eclipse 4.0
http://download.eclipse.org/e4/sdk/

Compare to downloads for Eclipse e4
http://download.eclipse.org/e4/downloads/

I'll be exploring how to do builds with
Eclipse 4.0 ... but expect it will be a few weeks before having anything
concrete to show for it. 
Over next few months, we'll be assessing
if our WTP bundles can feasibly be compiled and ran on each platform stream
in a compatible fashion. 
I think we are fairly API clean ...
but, am sure we have some violations ... some intentional, some not. 
So, we'll need to see how close we are
to being compatible, and at this point, its probably easiest to investigate
just by trying it out, trying to build against it. 
I tried importing/compiling the big
massive workspace of "all of WTP" I try to maintain, but didn't
get very far, with the particular build I picked to try it out, 
but it was an old build from at least
a week ago ... I'm sure RC1 will be much better :)  

While not our first priority, I'd encourage
WTP committers to start getting familiar with it -- hopefully this quick
blurb of links and info can help get you started.