[eclipse.org-architecture-council] E4 Discussion Minutes Posted

["Oberhuber, Martin" <Martin.Oberhuber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

 

Today's E4 Discussion Minutes are now posted on the Wiki. We have some

Action Items

• Martin to send conference bridge PIN to new PIN Holder volunteers
• Martin to finish Meeting Notes and merge discussions into E4 Summit Agenda
• Mik to add notes about Mylyn interaction event log
• Mik to write a position paper about Focus Service and Notification Service for the E4 Summit
• All: Find an Expert who knows Macro Recording in other Apps (Emacs, OpenOffice? KDE? Others?)
•  ??? to start creating Wiki Pages for Services

Please propose a Macro Recording Expert and or Macro Recording Apps to Investigate here on the architecture council mailing list.

Who would volunteer starting to create Wiki Pages for Services? Or can this wait until after the Summit, assuming that a more complete list of Services will come out of the Eclipse Application Model discussion?

 

Since it worked well today, I also created an Agenda Wiki for the next Architecture Council call on Thursday, June 12 .

Please start signing up on the Wiki and filling the Agenda with items.

I'll not be able to join the next EAC call, so could a notestaker please volunteer for next time.

 

I'll likely also not be able to come to the E4 Summit, so pleas apologize if I stirred up things that I'll probably not be able to discuss in person -- Michael Scharf and Doug Schaefer will join the Summit on behalf of Wind River.

 

In addition to the chronological meeting notes, I also created an "Executive Summary" with what I understood was the essence of the things we talked about today. Please edit the Wiki yourselves to add your names to the attendee list, and fix any misunderstandings. The Wiki is now unlocked for editing; I will start copying discussion notes to the E4 Summit Pages tomorrow, so if you make any editions today they will be part of the E4 Summit Agenda.

 

Executive Summary of the Discussion

• #Eclipse Application Model
  • Besides the List of Services we're compiling now by hand, we'll need a strong way of describing the Services for E4 -- as a medium for newcomers to understand Eclipse -- perhaps Tooling to make Service Descriptions machine readable / usable
  • Especially when Services go on the Server (Sessions, Macros Recording), need a consistent Story for exposing a Service, its state and commands, need to be #Getting rid of Singletons
  • Mik to write Position Papers on new Focus Service and Notification Service
  • Every Service should have a Wiki page describing it and the Architecture behind it (probably linked from the E4/Eclipse Application Model Summary Page
  • Application Model is related to almost all other architectural topics (#Too Many Listeners, #Becoming More Asynchronous, #Dependency Injection, Sessions, Macro Recording)

• #Too Many Listeners
  • For too many different listener classes problem, the Champions will sit together at the Summit to merge generic Listener concepts from (EMF, DataBinding, others)
  • For too many listener instances problem, a general Command Bus / Event Bus may help. Related to Application Model.
  • Champions to sit together at Summit and merge concepts from (EMF, DataBinding, Others)

• #Becoming More Asynchronous
  • Need a consistent overall picture; get above the level where we deal with these things one by one
  • #Jobs and Scheduling Rules have some problems; Realms and Runnables are good; We have too many Runnables; Futures could be a solution
  • Too many different ways of doing things, a more consistent Application Model would help getting more asynchronous
  • Consistent (machine-usable?) Documentation of Concurrency Properties
  • Recommend usage, e.g. #Avoid Modal Dialogs; #Verboten: Spinning the event loop

• #Sessions, Role-based Access and Security
  • For role-based hiding of UI elements, Capabilities got better in 3.4
  • For role-based denial of services in non-UI, need some basic concepts ("user", "role", "session") - coarse grained, not necessarily using Java Security
  • Mapping Roles onto Sessions seems the right thing
  • Matt Flaherty will be at the Summit and have Lots of Input -- schedule a Session

• #Macro Recording and Playback
  • Commands plus Undo Stack together are good but unsure how far they will get us -- at least also need #Non-UI Scripting
  • Cannot force all plugins to use Commands -- EMF introduced ChangeListener
  • Need to make the discussion more concrete, need experts to look at how Macro Recording is done in other apps
  • Shoot for a "90%" solution where editable Scripts are recorded and users can fine-tune them by editing
  • Strongly Related to #Eclipse Application Model (Service / Command Bus)

• #Preference Leveling
  • Too many unstructured Preferences, need a consistent top-down Story
  • Exportable User Prefs (carry around on an USB key); Sharable Team Prefs; Style Sheets; Export with more Categories; Share Settings between multiple Projects rather than Copying
  • Separate Session at the Summit

• #Java 5 Usage
  • To be discussed at the Summit

• #Workspace, Resources, Content Types
  • Project Nesting (physically and logically); Namespace Resolution (multiple projects with same name in a workspace); Inclusion of Files from Anywhere; Add/remove project type/nature; Listeners and plug-in Loading; Getting rid of Project for RCP (see #Build Granularity)
  • To be discussed at the Summit

• #Build Granularity
  • New flavors of SDK, RCP-with-resources, RCP-with-workbench-but-without-resources
  • To be discussed at the Summit

• #Launch / Debug Enhancements
  • Launch Stepper, extendable Launches, Multicore Debug Enhancements -- Not an E4 topic, can be improved evolutionary

Cheers,

--

Martin Oberhuber, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Wind River

Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member

http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm