RequirementsCouncil06TP

Timeline

This is the discussed at the March 2006 Requirements Council meeting at EclipseCon.

• 2006 – Late April – Team email on “key themes/trends” that matter (Collaborate on the WIKI if technically possible to keep within the council)
• 2006 – Early May – Conference call re: email brainstorm, first draft for council
• 2006 – June – Council meeting
• 2006 – July – Requirements council delivers “DRAFT: themes and priorities”, with preamble (or some cool name for this) i.e.,”mid course planning advice”, “areas of focus” or “trends and recommendations”. Plus – each theme streamlined and “why this theme is important”
• 2006 – September – Members at meeting get interactively involved in themes v3
• 2006 – October – Council meeting
• 2006 – December – Council meeting, and Board approved Roadmap v3

Brainstorming

The following are major themes and priorities currently under discussion. Please add and edit at will. For each theme and priority, be sure to add details as to why this is a priority.

Support for VISTA

When VISTA is released there will be a number of efforts to port Windows applications. This presents an opportunity for organizations who will take the opportunity to migrate to the more ubiquitous and portable Eclipse platform. In order to leverage the opportunity as much as possible, it is essential that relevant Eclipse projects support and leverage VISTA.

RCP

RCP adoption has been strong by the ecosystem in 2006. The goal is for projects to support and use the Eclipse RCP as much as possible. Aside from general use of RCP, there are two additional dimensions to this theme. First, making use of "Thin RCP" too. Making as much use of RCP on thin clients as possible and enhancing the abilities of RCP to work in these environments. Second, making RCP as easy as possible to use so that it's easier for application developers to adopt.

Embedded Device Software

Place holder.

Ease of use

• Provide a "Java IDE" download (~54MB) in addition to the SDK download (121MB).
  • Most Eclipse users don't require PDE or source
• Provide a more instructive download page "What do you want to do?"
  • Java application development: Platform+JDT
  • Eclipse application development: Eclipse SDK
  • JEE application development: Platform+JDT+WTP
  • Create, edit, and run reports: Platform+BIRT
  • (other combinations involving tools)
• Add icon to welcome page that opens the update manager (on Callisto site?)

Large Scale Installations

The Update manager is a fantastic tool for a person updating his/her own installation. However in big organisations, for various reasons, the organisation might want to make sure that large numbers of users have similar Eclipse set-ups. This could involve various aspects of the system, eg. what Eclipse components are installed, what preferences and other values are set etc. On one level this could be a convenience thing so that this would enable central management to help developers to be up-to-date, on a different level some organsiations might want a policy of stricter control where the maintenance of the environment is also about enforcing a development policy and toolset, this would need more work in that it would require some kind of Eclipse internal policy management which I suspect might be very hard to do? Still, the convenience thing would already most likely be very helpful in containing maintenance costs for large installations?

Team support for Eclipse

In this context what I mean be "team support" are features to enable a developer to get started as part of a (new or exisiting) team. This could include many of the above central management aspects: making sure that the person has the correct software set-up, that the software settings are appropriate for the team and then finally (which falls outside perhaps of the above management) that the projects and the project content can be easily "bootstrapped" to the new workstation. Here the ultimate goal could be that once a "team manager" has been told the IP address of a new member's PC, he would have 10 minutes later a fully configured Eclipse workstation with all the project's Eclipse project and all related settings on his/her machine.

Emerging Trends

AJAX, Mobile/Embedded

SWT

Is the covered mostly under Vista and RCP?