The e4 summit happened in Ottawa recently. The summit was great in so many ways, it goes to show you the amount of passion certain people have for moving Eclipse forward. A lot of credit goes to the Platform team for really putting stuff together and opening things up. A personal highlight of the summit for me was having great people like McQ bare his soul on the future longevity of Eclipse.
There has been some recent chatter about what went on at the e4 summit, but I think it’s hard for someone to really say something if they weren’t there. Sure, the wiki has some information but it doesn’t tell the complete story. I think the main thing that was accomplished was opening things up and getting the community excited about the future of the Eclipse platform. The mission statement that most people agreed with at the summit was that e4 was, “the next generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools.”
As for my personal takeaways:
- It was cool to see Adobe there and their interest in the SWT Mac Cocoa port
- The ability to style Eclipse is important to everyone… let’s bring sexy back
- Macro recording will become a reality, look for prototypes soon in e4
- EMF isn’t so bad 🙂
- Multi-lingual plug-ins need to happen… possible PDE/JSDT integration
- A lot of people care about flexible resources… look for it to become real
- The OSGi component model is cool… it needs to be brought to other domains
- I learned a lot from Steve Northover… especially about the Hydra
A lot more things happened, but that’s what currently sticks in my mind. On the whole, expect to see some good things happening out of e4… and remember… there should be nothing stopping you from getting involved… the door is open…
Want to get involved?
Sign up on the mailing list and state your interest! It’s that easy.