[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: Naming the Eclipse Application Framework

["David J. Orme" <daveo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hans Deragon wrote:
> David J. Orme wrote:
> > The current solution has been to observe that JFace is currently 
> > distributed as a part of the Eclipse platform (Platform/UI); 
> > consequently all JFace questions are being directed to e.platform.  
> > This is a good intermediate solution, but if more and more people 
> > build standalone applications based on something less than the Eclipse 
> > platform, but something more than just SWT, this confusion is likely 
> > to increase, not decrease.  This will especially be true if people 
> > keep calling these applications "SWT applications" after their most 
> > recognizable ingredient.
>
> Your idea is not that bad, but most people working on GUI stuff probably 
> only read eclipse.platform.swt.  I am concerned that if I post a JFace 
> question to eclipse.platform, many people with the answer would simply 
> not have read it, simply because they might not be subscribed to 
> eclipse.platform.  Myself, I am currently only reading 
> eclipse.platform.swt...

I share your concern, but in this case I'm only reporting policy, not 
making it.

> Maybe we should rename eclipse.platform.swt to eclipse.platform.gui.  
> This would be clearer.  Maybe we could create:
>
> eclipse.platform.gui.swt
> eclipse.platform.gui.jface
>
> But given the traffic, that might be overkill for the moment.  And if 
> someone asks a generic question like "how can I do XYZ"?, well that 
> person cannot figure out in advance if the answer would relate to SWT or 
> JFace, thus that person would not know in which newsgroup to post.  
> Probably renaming eclipse.platform.swt to eclipse.platform.gui would be 
> the best.

Again, I'm only the messenger here so please don't shoot me. ;-)  I 
personally think this would be better too but I didn't make the decision 
and I think that what we've got is so much better than what we had that 
I'm not about to start complaining now.

On the other hand, if you feel strongly about this, I suggest opening a 
new bug report in Bugzilla and we'll see how many people vote for it. 
The argument against this seems to have been that there currently aren't 
that many people using Eclipse this way.

But there haven't been any benchmarks to show it one way or another. 
Let's use Bugzilla as our community interest profiler and see what happens.

> > The best name I've thought of so far is Eclipse Application Framework 
> > (EAF); certainly somebody else can do better... :-)
>
>  > Thoughts?
>
> Eclipse Standalone Application Framework (ESAF) would be marginally 
> better. But this would apply for more than SWT and JFace.  It could also 
> include sound manipulation if one day such plugin is available (maybe it 
> already is?  I did not check).

I don't think there's a cross-platform sound plug-in yet (other than 
what's in Java already).

Just to throw another few possibilities into the mix:

Rich Client Framework (RCF)

or

Eclipse Client Framework (ECF)


Dave
--
Dave Orme
Advanced Systems Concepts
http://www.swtworkbench.com