E4/Meeting Minutes/Status 20081113

E4 Status Call

Kenn Hussey Ed Merks Martin Oberhuber Kim Horne Kai Toedter Jochen Krause John Arthorne Tom Schindl Boris Bokowski Paul Webster Kevin McGuire

Kai:

• Working on agreement for him to be able to contribute to Eclipse

Jochen:

• Making 3.x workbench more flexible, interesting for both 3x and e4
• RAP users have different requirements for styling the UI
• Have been talking about CSS
• How to style the toolbar, menu bars, the header
• Relationship to presentation API?
• You can have one presentation for editors and one for views
• Made more flexible, can have one per stack part
• Can have Outlook l&f
• Using preferences for customizing view action
• Information density
• Make it easier to have headers, move the menu bar around (not for all OS’s), move status bars
• Prototyping stages
• Real world use cases
• E.g. Riena introduced a new workbench
• Kevin to send Jochen contact for usability study

Tom Schindl

• Declarative UI – looking forward to f2f discussion at ESE
• Ed: is the model something you gen the artifacts and there’s no model left, or is the model there at runtime driving the application.

John A:

• Some discussion on e4 resources on making things more async, spun off general discussion on async APIs
• Current state is ideas in search of code
• The main area where there is code today is in support of resource filters
• Being able to filter out folder children
• The UI presented was extremely complex so next is to figure out how to simplify the UI (don’t want to expose regex to users)
• Provisioning of the repo for builds
• Focus is on incremental changes to 3.x
• Raises question on approach of trying to keep compatibility from the start or not
• Boris: maybe its best to keep the work separate in the IDE plugin so we can explore without busting each other
• Maybe we can split plugins into pieces which can have optional versions

Kevin:

• CSS – need to resubmit to meet IP legal requirements then hopefully approval will follow shortly. Hope to have this by end of week.
• Good discussion on declarative UI. We keep using the term “model” but we need more precision over what it’s a model of.
• It’s a model of SWT: this has merit but should be a 1:1 correspondence with SWT
• Higher level: could be requirements driven, or some other abstraction of the widget layer.
• The latter is more contentious since there are many possibilities but it’s a rich area of investigation.

Paul:

• Initial success on building against e4 repo
• Goal is to be able to update e4 directly into 3.x
• Discussion over what we should do with plugin version numbers.
• If you’re doing e4 in a 3.x plugin., and its compatible, bump the minor version by 100.
• Resources are 85% there, can apply resource feature patches
• Then there’ll be the work of integrating it in the common build infrastructure
• Is P2 planning on publishing and maintaining the installer?
• John: not a lot of interest or effort to use and maintain
• Right now we’re focused on CVS but there’s discussion on whether in the future we should consider something like git
• To be created: a build page with best practices, instructions

Boris:

• Created CVS directories, moved a few UI plugins over
• Photo demo almost working, no menu or toolbar
• Renamed plugins to be more consistent, org.eclipse.e4.ui.*
• Next week is ESE with e4 symposium, currently 54 people registered
• Jochen: Can we try to conference you in? Will try to arrange. Session is afternoon.
• Investigation on how web components can be integrated into Eclipse.
• If you already have a web component and want to show it in Eclipse how do we integrate it?
• E.g. if editor can be saved, want dirty indicator to light up and behave
• Current example is an IBM product. If anybody has pieces of web UI that are EPL (preferably) or other use cases then that’d be great so could show more of what we’re working on.

Additional:

• Jochen: those in ESE symposium should arrange some structure around the session.
• Propose people get together the hour after the members meeting. Would be 12 EST to conference Boris in.
• Martin: there is a lot of information missing on the project home page. Boris believes we all have commit rights to it.
• Bugzilla: top level category is Eclipse, product is e4, component is resource or UI. We need more (e.g. doc, SWT).
• JohnA: there’s a project proposal called FireFly, its about mobile RIA, might be of interest to e4, we should take a look at it to see how it might interact. Having mobile use cases drives scaling down and other structural benefits.
• Reminder that EclipseCon09 deadline is approach.