I had a bit of time to reflect on the Equinox Summit and here are my take aways:
- p2 development is progressing very quickly
- Dynamic-aware programming (service / extension registry) within OSGi is hard (we should adopt a standard way by Eclipse 4.0)
- Service Activator Toolkit (SAT) is making its way into Equinox
- It’s p2 not P2
- Next time on pay-per-view: Spring-OSGi versus Declarative Services
- It’s time to move the Equinox console out of the framework itself
- Ottawa has a cat problem
- ECF has some new requirements due to p2 to support adaptive downloading
- Creating a standard and lightweight way to pass messages between Equinox instances is a bit tricky (178927,201154,4922)
- I fear the p2 UI will suffer from the sins of our past. We really need to move away from doing everything within Eclipse. The p2 UI should take hints from Firefox. I’d rather have p2 come up with a standard package for information (analogous to the XPI format) and allow people to use the embedded browser to install things via one click.
- Should Eclipse.org maintain a central metadata repository to avoid RPM Hell? A large central repository is what Linux distros have moved to as they have learned from the past cries of their users.
- Having an “Eclipse Installed” sticker on your laptop can cause you to meet interesting people at the airport
- p2 plans to go live during Eclipse 3.4M5
- p2 will be requiring developers to do build-to-build upgrades using p2
- Note: This is so crucial it’s not even funny. One of the biggest reasons the old Update code didn’t get more love is because we didn’t “eat our own dog food” so to speak.
On the whole, the trip was very enjoyable. It was a pleasure to meet new people and see some faces I haven’t see in awhile. Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and Jeff for putting this event together. Maybe it’s time for a PDE Summit in Austin :)?