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Eclipse Platform e4 Just Getting Off the Ground
3/25/2008
Concerns about the relatively large amount of resources IBM commits to Eclipse projects are not new, said Milinkovich.
"It's a very mature, very complex code base," he said. "From a purely technical point of view, it's tough to get into it. Also, the development team from IBM has been working together for years, full time on this project. So you've got an extremely competent team with high standards and expectations of one other, and a complex and mature code base. Those two things together make it hard to get in."
Milinkovich added that "E4 gives us the opportunity to get off to a new start because it will be new code. It's an opportunity to get greater diversity into the community."
"It's actually very hard to get involved in that code base, and we really don't have enough community participation," Wilson said. "There's a lot of preexisting code written by a small team. We've gotten to the point now where that code has gotten baroque, and it's very difficult to surgically modify the code."
The PMC is planning to have a working concept prototype for next year's EclipseCon, Wilson said.
At this point, e4 is little more than a community gathering point where early code changes and ideas can be tracked. Current goals for the project include improvements to scripting, new tools to help Java programmers build plug-ins, an improved separation between the interface and data through a DOM, and possibly a scripting engine and support for Cascading Style Sheets. Plans also include a well-described set of services delivered using a RESTful architecture.
With all of the buzz around e4, Steve Northover sought to allay fears about support for the 3.x versions (particularly 3.4, Ganymede). He said that they would not be abandoned, and in fact, development would continue for about five more years, with many of the features developed for version 4.0 appearing in 3.x releases.
John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Palo Alto, CA.
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