[news.eclipse.tools] Plugin.java instead of plugin.xml

["Carl Rosenberger" <carl@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

- Are you considering to support changing plugins while the engine is
running? Rebooting steals everyones time while developing tools. A manual
reload of a specified plugin would be good enough.

- Why is an XML file necessary to specify interfaces? Wouldn't it be much
cleaner and more typesafe to stick to Java only? How about a file
Plugin.java in every plugin Jar? Remember that reflection could be used to
analyse this file so no redundant information would be necessary at all.
Yes, I have seen the existing XML masks (and their bugs). XML always remains
a sloppy workaround, if not everything is doublechecked automatically. The
combination of an XML-typo and restarting Eclipse to fix it is just awful.
Java typechecking *is there* already.

- Are you keeping in mind that an Eclipse-like interface could one day be
running as a client in a webbrowser (hopefully Eclipse *will be* the
webbrowser :-) ) ?


Congratulations for this beautiful piece of software. Thanks for your great
work! This will not be an IDE for software development only. The framework
is perfectly suitable for just about any application I can think of.

If my points have been brought up here before, sorry for repeating them. I
am just too excited to read along silently first. We will definitely supply
an Eclipse plugin for our object database.


Kind regards,
Carl
---
Carl Rosenberger
db4o - database for objects - http://www.db4o.com