[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] Re: What is the contribution?

["Tim Wagner" <twagner@xxxxxxx>]

BEA originally proposed a somewhat wider scope for the LDT project, but 
initial guidance from people inside Eclipse was that too grand a scope might 
set the wrong expectation or cause a certain amount of confusion.

After EclipseCon and a good deal of verbal feedback, it seems clear that 
several areas of parallel development are indeed interesting to the 
community, including enhanced Java support, a reified language model and 
generic editor services, support around metalinguistic generation (like 
Chris Daly's work), dynamic/interpreted language support, and so forth.

With regard to contributions: BEA is already actively engaged in working 
with the JDT team on an initial project, bringing APT/Mirror support (JSR 
269) to the Eclipse Java editing experience, and this includes migrating 
concepts and in some cases code from our existing code to the JDT. We'll 
apply the same logic to other LDT projects: If there are helpful algorithms, 
data structures, or language-based APIs we've devised, then we're happy to 
share them with the larger community. What I don't want to do is drop a huge 
ZIP file and suggest it as the answer to a complex constellation of language 
and compilation challenges...it's really the developer support and overall 
community interest that should drive specific BEA contributions.



"Bob Foster" <bob@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:d0orud$3u1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>I asked this question, "What is the contribution?" at the late-scheduled 
>EclipseCon LDT session. The speaker turned it into, "Is there a 
>contribution?" and answered to the effect that BEA has a lot of code on the 
>subject and might consider making some of it open source.
>
> To which I say, hmmm.
>
> The thing that struck me most about the talk is how grand was the vision, 
> yet most comments here are to the effect that the scope is too limited. I 
> suspect that the difference is that the BEA team has more experience in 
> the trenches with actually trying to generalize multiple language support 
> in the context of practical examples, like JSP, annotations, etc., while 
> the commenters have the luxury of still being able to discuss the subject 
> in the abstract.
>
> This would be a good conversation, if there were one. What is needed is 
> some comment from BEA.
>
> Bob
>
> Bob Foster wrote:
>> With all those BEA heads, it's obvious this is a BEA-inspired initiative 
>> (which is a good thing) and probably means BEA intends to contribute some 
>> technology to kick the project off. It's entirely appropriate to discuss 
>> what that technology is and how its approach differs from or works with 
>> other initiatives in this area, like the previously mentioned SSE, and 
>> Chris Laffra's generative plugin work.
>>
>> I and I'm sure many others are very excited by work in this area. I'm 
>> looking forward to your Thursday 2 pm session at EclipseCon (for other 
>> attendees, the session didn't make the program - check the fliers near 
>> the messages board) where some of these questions will no doubt be 
>> answered. But please remember the millions of Eclipse developers who 
>> aren't at EclipseCon, and put that info on the web.
>>
>> Bob Foster