E4/Tooling

In order for e4 to succeed, it will need to have a solid tooling story. There are some outstanding issues in PDE that need to be solved to enable working against the various targets e4 is aiming to support.

Target Platform Issues

[186618]: Target Platforms should be more first class

[159072]: Associate target definitions on a per-project basis (multiple target platforms)

Application Model / Services Tooling

See e4/Eclipse Application Model. When we come up with a strong consistent story of what a Service is, how it exposes its Properties, Capabilities and State, we'll also want some Tooling to create these descriptions and do some consistency checks.

Concurrency Tooling

See e4/Architectural Foundations. When we come up with a consistent Story for managing asynchronousity / concurrency, we might want some tooling to Refactor or migrate existing code into the new Story; do consistency checks on concurrent access etc.

Macro Recording / Script Editor

See e4/Commands. When it's possible to record a macro of operations on Eclipse, we'll want a macro / script editor (with content assist, of course) to edit that script as well as tools to organize / replay scripts, assign them to menu items, toolbar buttons etc (similar as in various Office products)

Client / Server Log Viewer

See Client / Server split. When the Application is split between Client and Server, we'll want to log interactions between the two (for problem determination), or replay interaction logs against a Server only for Unit Testing.

The question is, what else do people want? What do they envision as the tooling story for e4?

Should we have more templates? There aren't many templates available in Eclipse... how can we make this easier?