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| Re: Eclipse IDE as a pure E4 IDE [message #880673 is a reply to message #875267] |
Sat, 02 June 2012 16:50  |
 Mike Haney
Messages: 25
Registered: June 2011 |
Junior Member |
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I agree with Roland. The bigger question is - so what?
The primary benefits of E4 are in the application model for RCP/plugin developers. As far as the IDE goes, the main benefit to end users is the comparative ease of maintenance and adding new features to the IDE. Personally, I'm glad that all 100+ projects under Eclipse (not to mention the hundreds of 3rd party tool developers) are not rushing to port their plugins to "pure" eclipse 4 model - I would much rather have the devs focused on bug fixes or new features. When the pain or limitations of supporting the older application model outweigh the costs of porting, then is the time to move, but each project should be able to decide that on their own.
Of course, outside the IDE, it's a different story. You are free to choose if/when you want to use the compatibility layer in your RCP apps. The important thing is, you have a CHOICE. Even for new RCP applications, sometimes the choice to use the 3.x model and the compatibility layer might be the correct one (e.g. project time constraints vs the time to retrain developers who are already experienced with the 3.x model, in-house tooling that hasn't been updated to the 4.x model yet, etc).
IMO, the compatibility layer was a very wise decision, and kudos to the platform team for that implementation. If you think about it, it's really quite an engineering feat to pull off, considering the considerable differences between the platforms in many areas. The compatibility layer (and in fact the whole 3.x to 4.x migration) are an excellent example of how to do this without giving your user base ulcers. We've all been burned by OSS projects that introduce major incompatible API changes on updates, many times with dubious touted benefits (Tapestry is an example that immediately comes to mind). That kind of thing can't happen with the Eclipse platform, but then again, most of us know they wouldn't let that happen (the process is too well managed) which is why we feel confident enough to base our development on Eclipse.
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