Eclipsecon 2009 and Eclipse 4.0

Recently I attended Eclipsecon 2009, an Eclipse community conference in Santa Clara, CA. Like previous years, the conference was very well organized and had sessions on various topics ranging from e4 (code name for Eclipse 4.0 release) to Cloud Computing. There was a lot of buzz and even a separate track for e4 - so let me begin by blogging on e4.

General sense I got was that Eclipse community has ambitious plans to make significant changes to Eclipse 4.0. More than 40 committers are working on Eclipse 4.0 release and the Eclipse community intends to deliver e4 Tech Preview in July, 2009 and the GA in summer 2010. They plan to provide a compatibility layer from Eclipse 3.x to Eclipse 4.x so there can be gradual adoption of Eclipse 4.0 J.  Following are some key highlights of the areas that they are planning changes –   

• There was talk of "How the current Eclipse platform UI is very rigid". To make the UI work across multiple platforms and web technologies, the SWT team is working on a model driven UI called XWT – which will leverage EMF based models and CSS style-sheets to render UI on multiple platforms and also on web using FLEX/action script, GWT or Silverlight. There is also separate effort to create declarative UI language for defining UI. So in summary, there is a lot of work and planning going on to provide different skins to the Eclipse platform.

• Eclipse resources are being enhanced to better support linked resources, groups and various resource filters are being added to Eclipse environment.

• Couple of Mozilla guys have teamed up with Eclipse committers and are working to provide ability to edit code from the web (by providing the same level of rich editing capabilities) using (I think) Bespin technology.

• There is a lot more work happening in different areas and I could go on ... but you get the idea. These are big changes and a lot of cool and new things to look forward to...

From OpenEdge Architect Perspective, we would need to keep an eye out on developments in e4 so that in future, we can leverage the full potential of the e4 to provide lot of these cool productivity enhancing new features to the OpenEdge developer community.