I'm not going to say much with this one. I'll just refer you to the comments people are adding to Boris's blog entry on his work with Mozilla to get an experimental IDE running in a browser with an Eclipse-based server back-end. Is this what developers working in the embedded and desktop space are asking for? Not that I've heard. And neither do a number of the commenters on Boris's article. Some of them are putting it in much prettier words than I could say without getting into trouble...
That's why it is so critical for those of us in the Eclipse community who support such users to make sure Eclipse continues to work well and to improve in the areas that cause them pain. Is the future of enterprise development so different from desktop and embedded that it requires such radical architectures? Maybe so. If that's true, we need to hold our ground and ensure we don't get dragged down a path we can't be going.
Doug, a different way to look at this from your perspective is this: Enabling "Eclipse in the Clouds" requires rethinking some of the assumptions we make in the platform. For example, the assumption that everything is a monolithic client side stack, or that workspaces are fast and highly available, or even that there is only one workspace per process [1]. Breaking down these assumptions and removing these limitations could be highly beneficial for CDT users, regardless of whether you want to have your IDE in a browser or not.
ReplyDeleteFundamentally, much of the e4 work is about removing limitations and enabling greater reuse of Eclipse components. "Eclipse in a Cloud" is just one example of the kinds of things you can do when some of these barriers are taken down. Many of the e4 developers just see Bespin as a neat example of what you can do with the e4 building blocks, rather than an end goal of the e4 technology. Something for you to ponder is can those same building blocks help you deliver much-needed functionality to the embedded and other CDT use cases?
[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=245399
Well said John. e4 represents a great opportunity to look at how we deliver IDE type services. Is there a better way to provide embedded developers these types of services?
ReplyDeleteI do know lots of embedded developers still think an IDE is point less. I only need a text editor! Wouldn't it be cool to see if emacs could be wired up to an eclipse server?
Maybe I'm just being a stick in the mud. But we want a monolithic client side stack. We're quite happy with that architecture because it meets our customer's needs. All we're asking is to fix up some of the pain points in the flexibility and scalability in the resource stack.
ReplyDeleteThere is a marked decrease in investment from the contributing vendors to the CDT, because it's meets their needs for the most part as is today. We don't need a radical new architecture. We just need some bugs fixed.
Now if you could show me how your work can improve start up times, then may get a sale...