[news.eclipse.technology.eep] Re: more ideas

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for not responding earlier.

On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 12:15 +0100, Jacek Pospychala wrote:
> hello,
> 
> I'm pleased to see the propsal and I'm really interested in eep.
> I have a several example applications as I usually write something to 
> learn new technology:
> - sample users management view using OSGi useradmin service.
> - a one-hour RAP chat application
> (those being most recent)
> 
> What I've found is that often regular committers don't really have time 
> to write examples. So sometimes it ends up with a description on wiki or 
> project webpage, how to implement a sample application (e.g. Equinox 
> server-side example: 
> http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/server/http_writing_application.php). 
> Description is good, but when you make mistake, then it's real pain to 
> find what's broken.

I think that it's probably more of a problem of granularity. Most
projects do provide examples, they're just too big and tend to solve
"real" problems, thereby introducing too much complexity to be really
helpful as a learning tool. On the other side of the coin, some projects
provide snippets that are very often too small, or constrained.

Managing complexity will be a real challenge with this project.

> 
> Projects don't have an organized way to publish examples. Ones put them 
> on wiki, others on cvs. But examples are always a great source of 
> knowledge. It would be nice to have links from projects to EEP, so 
> everyone could browse for some examples and easier find them.
> 

Agreed. Having a single home for examples should be good for the
community as a whole.

> I'm not sure what's your intention behind EEP "examples as small as 
> possible" value - are the projects supposed to be showcases for 
> EclipseFoundation technology = pieces of code that one can download and 
> stare at for hours :)
> Or minimal samples, that one can write within a hour, 4 hours or a day. 
> In fact it's usually that newcomer to any technology (e.g. OSGi or RAP) 
> might spend a couple of days on an example that takes an hour to review 
> it's whole code.

They're supposed to be examples. They'll be of varying sizes and
complexity. In general, the intent is to provide examples that span
project and therefore don't otherwise have a natural home.

The "Small as possible" value is essentially an effort to avoid adding
unnecessary bulk to examples. Keep things as simple as possible, but no
simpler.

> 
> I'd be really happy to see EEP as a place to put such a 
> useful-for-learning examples of different technologies. It could be 
> sometimes the same topic (e.g. Sudoku), but different implementations 
> (EMF-based, fullblown RCP, RAP, eRCP, etc) to be able to compare them.
> Smaller examples would be easy to write and EEP could have a lot of 
> contributions, a real catalog of "what you can do with Eclipse".
> I'd love to provide some example apps to EEP then.
> 

One of the bigger challenges we're going to have is managing it all.
Like every other project, EEP won't be able to accept every line of code
that's contributed. Contributions will have to come with some amount of
development resources and some dedication to maintaining the examples.
The proposal document discusses an archival process for out of date
examples, but we'll have to come up with a strategy for identifying
what's out of date and doing something about it.

> Also examples that are already spreaded across all projects could be 
> linked on EEP - to don't force projects committers to move their 
> examples there, but rather make them more visible.
> 

Agreed

> btw, Equinox will discuss a place to contribute examples and demos on 
> next confcall: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_Minutes_-_20080226 - 
> might be worth to bring EEP topic too.
> 

Oops. Missed the call. Did it get discussed?

> cheers
> 
> Jacek