E4/Resources/Requirements

Overall Goals and Themes

• See the E4/Resources/Meeting/19-Sep-2008 Kick-off#Interested Parties and Background for the various interested parties, their background and Requirements.
• Allow Eclipse projects to better model real-world setup of projects (Theme: Ease Of Use).
  • Scalability - support very large workspaces well,
  • Alias handling - Better support symbolic links and linked resources,
  • Make it easier for end-users to get their stuff into Eclipse (Theme: Facilitated On-Boarding):
    • Adapt Eclipse Project structure to any kind of legacy project or file system structures
    • be competitive with (Visual Studio, Slickedit, Netbeans, IDEA) and other IDE's,
    • integrate with (Maven, Proprietary project systems...) and other project systems where appropriate,
• Support pervasive distributed workspaces
  • enable future environments (client/server, distributed, web, collaborative),
• provide simpler and safer programming models enabling more concurrency in the overall E4 world,
• building a solid base of Eclipse for the next 10 years.

Requirements

• Support file-list based projects.
• Support natural organization of projects (physical nesting).

Constraints

• Do not break basic assumptions that clients of Eclipse Resources have today. What are these assumptions?
• Support the current form of resources today, and more.

Use-Cases

Open an existing Eclipse 3.x project

Workspace compatibility is a must.

Import an existing DevStudio project

• Just toss the wsp / wpj files into Eclipse and use CDT's parsers immediately. Provide the same views as Devstudio.

Debug an Exectuable without a Project

• Assume that the Exe has debug info embedded. start debugging it immediately without having to set up a project. Support static analysis / parsing and symbol navigation seamlessly.

Set up a Team-shared Workspace

• On-boarding an existing team must be as easy as double clicking a file.