e4: Community is Everything

Recently we posed the question, What Would You Add To Eclipse 4.0 and it got a phenomenal response. The core principals behind e4 will be web enablement and decreased complexity. While the RAP project brings us some of the way along the road, there's more work needed.

The computing environment is changing - we're moving towards Rich Internet Applications backed by RESTful services, giving us a responsive development cycles with applications that are much easier to deploy over the web. The important thing is that Eclipse has noted this trend and is making plans in moving towards it.

As I noted in the article, now is a great time to get involved in the project and shape the future of Eclipse, and desktop applications in general. The talk about Eclipse 4.0 at EclipseCon noted one very important thing: that there wasn't enough committer activity in the community. The project will be added to the incubator soon and there will be a need for committers in almost every area - from Web UIs, client-server programming, modelling to Javascript. This type of refocus means that now is the time to join in the fun - in a way it's like a fresh start with new code and less complexity.

To keep up with e4 news stay tuned to EclipseZone. You can also join or browse the e4 mailing list at the Eclipse 4.0 Mailing List page.

It's interesting to get an idea of what people are looking for - from the comments in the Eclipse 4.0 post it's clear that even Ganymede, Eclipse 3.4, due out this June may have catered to some of your concerns. It seems that some of you are looking for improvement in the softer things like the online documentation, usability, and the package management system. Zviki Cohen has written an insightful blog post about The Road To Eclipse 4.0 where he outlines the top 5 challenges that will face Eclipse 4.0, performance being top of the list.

It's not the first time that the memory footprint of Eclipse has been brought up - we're working on some tips and tricks here at EclipseZone to show how you can save some memory with your Eclipse configuration. We appreciate all of your comments and I sincerely hope that the concerns start to get addressed by upcoming releases.

For examples of Eclipse out in the industry, Nitin points us to a two part series of articles about the evolution of eBay's architecture to an Eclipse-based plug-in framework that helped them solve some thorny front-end scalability issues.

Still on EclipseCon 2008
We wrapped up our coverage of EclipseCon 2008 with a set of interviews asking Wayne Beaton and Lynn Gayowski from the Eclipse Foundation, as well as Christian Dupuis from SpringSource what they took from the conference. The common theme among all of their impressions has been the community - getting to meet the committers and networking with others. If you're in Europe, Eclipse Forum is coming up on April 21st in Germany, with a few really good repeats of some of the talks from EclipseCon.

Refcardz
On a completely separate topic, DZone Refcardz are high-quality, professionally produced quick reference cards that give you "tech facts at your fingertips". Get your hands on these cards early by signing up for the Refcardz Beta program - there's an Eclipse card due out as well as Spring Configuration, GWT, and Ajax with a new one nearly every week once they're launched. I've seen the first few, and I have to say that these are looking great, and I'm looking forward to the release of the first four.

Until Next Time,
James Sugrue
EZ Zone Leader
james.sugrue@gmail.com