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Silverlight Development Toolkit - SLDT

Introduction

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. 

Both Microsoft Silverlight and Eclipse technologies focus on delivering a rich, differentiating and interoperable environment to their respective audiences: Web Users and Developers respectively.

By integrating the Microsoft Silverlight technology with the Eclipse platform, this project proposes to extend the Silverlight Development Experience to all Web Application Developers should they be running Windows, Linux or Mac OS.

The Silverlight Development Toolkit (SLDT) is a proposed open-source project under the Eclipse Development Process, and will incubate under the top-level Technology project. This proposal is posted here to solicit community feedback and additional project participation. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.sldt newsgroup.

Scope

The purpose of this project is to provide a cross-platform development environment to build the RIA Web application on Microsoft Silverlight. It consists in a set of Eclipse plug-ins that address two main issues: Silverlight applications development, and easing the integration of Java-based web sites and services into Silverlight applications.

Silverlight applications development

This environment provides the all necessary tools to simplfy the RIA Web development on Microsoft Silverlight. It is composed of the following groups of tools:

  • Silverlight project creation and resource management
  • XAML visual editor with instant preview
  • Controller class editors for most used programming languages such as C#, Java and JavaScript
  • Build, run and debug

Integration between Silverlight and Java-based web sites and services

In today’s heterogeneous computing environments and with the emergence of Web services and service-oriented architectures, interoperability has become a critical business and IT need. The interoperability between Silverlight and Java middle wares is the main focus of this project. Based on the standard technologies, this project will propose the common patterns with necessary tools, best practices, or out-of-the box solutions to help developers to connect quickly the RIA Web application on Microsoft Silverlight with Java-based enterprise services.

Relationship with Other Eclipse Projects/Components

SLDT leverages the Eclipse platform blocks to provide features such as resource management, source edition, code generation, build and launch of applications. WTP components are the most heavily used.

SLDT also extends the following components:

  • XML editor
  • Java Script editor
  • HTML editor

Organization

Mentors

  • Ed Merks
  • Wayne Beaton

Initial Committers

The initial committers for this component would be:

Code Contributions

Soyatec offers an initial code donation, which is hosted on sourceforge: http://eclipse4sl.sourceforge.net. The SLDT implementation consists in Java packages : the org.eclipse.wtp.sldt.* namespace.

Interested Parties

Interest in this project has been expressed by

Developer Community

The team of initial committers will explore statements of interest from additional developers experienced in Web and UI development or willing to gain such experience.

User Community

It is expected that the user community for this component will consist primarily of Web developers, given that it is essentially tools for building RIA Web applications for the Microsoft Silverlight technology, connecting to Java Business Logic.

Project Plan

The first official release of the project will be released arround Janurary 2009. The goal of this release is to meet the key requirements for Silverlight development in Eclipse by providing a toolkit covering the entire development cycle :

  • Silverlight project creation and resource management
  • XAML editor with immediate preview
  • C# and JavaScript editor
  • Build and run

More advanced features will be released in Spring 2009. Summer major release is planned for June 2009 aligned with annual release of Eclipse.

Afterwards, we will focus on interoperability between Silverlight and Java, but also on bringing the development story to other platforms (Apple, Linux…)

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