Eclipse 4.0 Plan

Author r.j Lorimer translator Song posted on March 17, 2008 9:20 A.M.

Earlier this week, teams and developers working on eclipse projects had a heated discussion about how eclipse would go next, all of which were triggered by an announcement by a hatching project called "E4" on the Eclipse Submitter's mailing list: The Eclipse Project PMC announces that a new component will be added to the Eclipse project incubator, named E4.

Component Description:

In the release cycle of Eclipse Project version 3.4, one of the more important plan entries is "create Eclipse4.0 plan." The goal is to identify the most pressing issues that will affect Eclipse's future success and plan to address them. The result is a new platform, "E4," which will be the foundation of Eclipse 4.0.

The goal of the E4 component is to provide a gathering place for the completed exploratory activities as a precursor to the E4 design. We expect to continue to work in this area until there is agreement on how all E4 results should be formed.

E4 's name implies Eclipse 4.0, the next major release number for Eclipse's classic release package and Eclipse platform project. The last three major eclipse release versions are as follows: Eclipse platform version 3.2 code callisto,eclipse platform 3.3 code Europa, upcoming release of the Eclipse platform 3.4 version code-named Ganymede.

All along, planning documents routinely outline the theme objectives of the corresponding version of Eclipse's top-level project. By tradition, top-level projects include eclipse platforms, Java development tools, Plug-in development tools, and all other components that are included in the Eclipse Classic release package (Java and Eclipse Plug-in IDE). This program has been in use since the 2.1 release of Eclipse, and each of the previous plans was available at the Eclipse top-level Project site. But the announcement of the E4 is slightly different, since no plans have been drafted and the Community's views are already being solicited.

Initially, the E4 project was just a place to gather community advice to track the initial changes and ideas of the code. Many participants agreed that the time had come to open the E4 project, with the aim of collecting community feedback and ideas in order to be able to eclipsecon the 2008 conference in the holding, in order to begin drafting the plan in response to community feedback. The Eclipse submitter, Kevin McGuire, who works primarily for the Platform UI team, describes E4: our platform team is very concerned about eclipse and we know you are. We want it to live long, healthy, and do what it can to serve the community. It's sad when we can't do that. It is clear that eclipse, as a platform, must be able to change if it is to remain long-lived, energetic and important. But the burden of a lot of plug-in, projects, and APIs means that the slightest change in the channel is blocked, and it takes a lot of effort to make any changes under current system constraints.

Therefore, two things have to be done:

A new space must be opened up to make it a place for experimentation and to breed new changes. Newcomers must be introduced to bring new energy, ideas, needs, knowledge, and enthusiasm. The two are closely linked.

This is E4.

Although there has been some lively discussion of the forms and methods of the initial project announcements, the E4 project may become the central test-bed for the various reforms that eclipse leads to the next major milestone. In the past, Eclipse's major version number increased to represent a significant change in the Eclipse project. The jump to eclipse 3.0 included a lot of big moves. For example, migrating eclipse to the OSGi platform, announcing and creating the Eclipse Rich Client platform (Rich-client platform), has also made overall improvements in appearance and performance. Expect Eclipse 4.0 to show such a significant change.

Infoq will continue to keep track of future eclipse plan decisions.

View English Original: Planning for Eclipse more than 4.0 of the content from: http://www.infoq.com/cn/