Revision as of 11:47, 28 April 2012

Nebula Restructure Plan

This page is to track the Nebula Restructure. Please add yourself to the Watch list if you want to stay in sync with the changes made to this page.

Please discuss this page on the nebula-dev mailing list.

Restructure based on initial docuware by Tom Schindl.

media:Nebula-Restructure.pdf

Move to Git

Done!

We will be moving to git. We are currently investigating the steps that are needed to get there. Please expect the cvs repository to become read only before the end of the year and probably sooner.

All activities in the transition will be communicated to the mailing list.

• Create repositories
  • Nebula Release
  • Nebula Incubation
  • Nebula NatTable
• Update References
  • Website
  • Wiki
  • Documentation

The current plan is to ask the webmaster to checkin the current CVS into the Release and Incubation repository, including the history, and then remove the projects that do not belong there.

Rename Projects

Done!

All projects will be renamed to the nebula widget standard project renaming as outlined in this page. The concrete in which these standards are poured is still wet so we can still make changes. Also, Nebula should move out of the swt namespace.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=364914

Release Schedule

Nebula Proper must follow a release schedule.

VCS Restructure

Done1

We will be restructuring the repository. Every widget will get its own little place in the repository like this:

bundles
  widget
     o.e.n.widgets.widget
     o.e.n.widgets.widget.feature
     o.e.n.widgets.widget.tests
     o.e.n.widgets.widget.tests.feature  <-- really needed?
     o.e.n.widgets.widget.example
     o.e.n.widgets.widget.snippets

In addition there will be some other structures:

releng

examples

attics

Build

Done!

• move to download
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/JAR_Signing
• Rename build jobs to remove the "maven" and "nightly" terms

Clean Committer list

In Progress Nebula/restructure/committers

There are currenly 24 committers to Nebula. This sounds good but most committers are inactive. We need to find out who is currently committing for Nebula and move all inactive committers from active committer state to the honourable list of committers alumni.

The current list of committers:

Assign/Deprecate Widgets

We need to find out which widgets are no longer supported and assign new owners. If no new owner can be found for the widget have to deprecate it or keep it in incubation.

Nebula Project Restructuring Proposal

This document describes a proposed restructuring of the Eclipse Nebula project. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback and requests for participation, by April 1st, to the nebula-dev mailing list or indicate interest in participation by submitting a Bugzilla report.

Background

Since its initial conception in 2006, Nebula has welcomed many new supplementary widgets. Many of these widgets are used in production environments around the globe.

Nebula is a place where different Eclipse-Projects and Independent developers collaborate on building Custom SWT widgets and reuseable UI-Components useable in UI-Applications built using SWT and JFace

The Nebula project was created to provide an incubator for the development of current and future rich widgets with the intent to move them to SWT after having been matured. None of the widgets produced by the Nebula Project - though stable and production ready - have ever been moved to SWT.

Actions

The following actions have been executed:

Creating Example Projects

Every widget that is contributed is required to contribute to the examples plugin. The examples plugin contains an extension point that can be used for contribution.

Currently the examples plugin contains many internal references. If we want to include the examples plugin to the build we need to create an example plugin for every widget and remove the references to this plugin from the examples plugin. See the oscilloscope.examples plugin for a reference.

Actions:

• Create an examples plugin for the widget
  • Move the widget related code to that new plugin
  • Add dependencies on o.e.ui and o.e.core.runtime
  • Add a dependency to o.e.nebula.examples
  • Create an extension to examples that points to the copied class
• In the examples plugin
  • Remove the reference to the widget
  • Remove the example java code
  • Remove the extension
• Commit the new plugin and the changed example to CVS

Use bug 364900 for commit comment

This has been finished. However, some projects miss the examples view.

Objective

The objective of the restructuring is that Nebula releases those supplementary components in a 1.0 release to foster adoption in commercial and opensource projects.

In the last few month many external parties asked for a stable release of Nebula-Components so that they can be used for downstream adoption but because of the different maturity level of the widgets found in Nebula and because of the permanent incubation status of the project we are not able to provide such a release.

The project as it is now will be split into two separate projects:

Nebula

Mature widgets found in Nebula are production ready, IP clean and have at least one active committer. The main target of this project is to maintain and release 1.0 and maintenance releases.

Scope

The main focus of the Nebula project is to provide none native UI-Controls using widget composition or drawing them using the SWT-GC. Being none native Nebula controls are not suffering the same Problem SWT-Widgets are facing and can so provide special features not available in native widgets.

Proposed widgets

Committers

Nebula-Incubator

The purpose of the perpetum incubator is to stage component contributions until they are ready to move to Nebula.

Scope

The incubator is used as staging area for Nebula because it is an incubator it will be easy for the community to join and develop widgets until stable enough so that they can be moved to the Nebula-Project to get released with it.

Proposed widgets (moved from current Nebula-Project)

NatTable

NatTable is a powerful and flexible SWT table/grid widget that is built to handle very large data sets, real-time updates, dynamic styling, and more.

Project Proposal