On catching up with my blog reading today, I came across a post by one of my good friends Bob Balfe. He links to an article by Peter Nehrer about dynamic plug-ins in Eclipse. I can’t stress enough how important this concept should be to an Eclipse developer. The current platform suffers from the case that certain plug-ins (bundles) aren’t dynamic aware causing the recommendation that Eclipse be restarted on every update (don’t mention apply changes, that popup should never exist in the first place). When we look past the 3.3 release and into a possible “4.0”, the concept of dynamic-aware plug-ins (bundles) is going to increase in importance.
I encourage all Eclipse developers to make their plug-ins dynamic aware and open bugs against projects that are lacking this functionality. Furthermore, when Netbeans decides to move to OSGi from its current module system (sometime early next year ;p), they may have a jump on us with all this crazy dynamic’ness.