Hi,
I don’t have enough context to
evaluate whether the Faceted Project Framework would fit the bill for what you
guys have been discussing, but I can certainly provide information about what
it is to help you make that evaluation. First, make sure not to miss the building
facets tutorial (http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-BuildingProjectFacets/tutorial.html).
Scan through it and you should have a decent idea about what it is.
Here are some other general statements
that might help…
1. Facets are akin to Project Natures on
steroids. Whereas natures are pretty basic and have to be hidden from user’s
view by specialized tooling, facets are fully-described and fully-tooled to let
an average user manipulate them directly
2. One of the original goals that led to
creation of the framework was the desire to stop proliferation of specialized
project wizards for what effectively amounted to the same “project type”.
The second part of that goal was to put to a stop to all the adhoc “Enable
X functionality” menu actions being attached to projects.
3. The Faceted Project Framework allows
precise modeling of tooling capabilities as they relate to capabilities of the
target platform. This is critical in the app server space, but the problem
exists in practically every other space as well. You wouldn’t want to use
generics if your target platform is a 1.4 VM, you wouldn’t want to enable
tools for building WPF UI if your target platform is Linux, etc.
Hope this clarifies and don’t
hesitate to ask if anything is unclear.

Konstantin Komissarchik | Consulting
Member of Technical Staff
Phone: +1 425 201 1795 | Mobile: +1 206 898 0611
Oracle
Eclipse Tooling
411 108th Ave NE, Suite 2100
| Bellevue, WA 98004
From: Oberhuber,
Martin [mailto:Martin.Oberhuber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008
5:30 AM
To: E4 developer list;
Konstantin.komissarchik@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [resources] Faceted
Project Framework, anybody?
a reference to something called "Faceted Project
Framework":
Facility for decomposing Eclipse projects into an
extensible set
of units of functionality (called facets) that can be easily added
and removed by the user. This is a mature component that currently
resides in WTP and would benefit the community better by having
wider exposure.
Sounds like this is something we'd like to have for E4
Resources,
and sounds familiar to the "Application Layer" to
Resources, aka
create arbitrary assemblies of Resources like Workingsets
Does anybody have any experience with the Faceted Project
Framework? Does that idea make sense?
Cheers,
--
Martin Oberhuber, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Wind River
Target Management
Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm