[equinox-dev] Equinox summary and direction

[Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

First, thanks to everyone who has worked
so hard on Equinox over the past year and a bit.  The project has
been an unqualified success.  The main task was to identify and prototype
an alternative runtime for Eclipse which offered standardization, dynamic
behaviour and security.  OSGi fits the bill on all fronts and perhaps
more importantly, we have found it fits well under Eclipse.  So well
in fact that the code developed in Equinox has been adopted by the main
Eclipse project and was just shipped with Eclipse R3.0.  Congratulations!

The Equinox project has been a bit of
a test case approach for incubating new technology for use in the Eclipse
platform.  It has had a secondary role as a path for others to get
involved in Eclipse and ultimately gain commit rights.  Again here
the project has succeeded with four of the OSGi code contributors now being
full Eclipse committers in the Platform Core component.  I would not
be surprised to see further incubator projects spring up.

We could stop here and be quite satisfied.
 I believe there is more to do however.  While the details are
somewhat fluid, the current direction is to continue Equinox as a place
to explore new runtime related technologies that we expect to, if successful,
directly impact the Eclipse Platform proper.  These should be items
whichAn incomplete, randomly ordered list includes:

- Security: This include understanding
the impact of running with Java 2 security enabled as well as approaches
to and facilities for application level security (e.g, authentication,
ACLs, ...)

- Scalability: Technology that helps
Eclipse scale up to more effeciently handle 1000s of plugins as well scale
down to smaller platforms and reduced functionality scenarios.  Examples
include declarative service specification and framework/runtime refactoring.

- Support for dynamic behaviour and
services programming:  The runtime fully supports the dynamic coming
and going of plugins but it is clear that this support is challenging to
put in place.  We need higher level abstractions, mechanisms and best
practices for handling the changing environment.

Some of this work may well happen in
the main Eclipse repository.  What work gets done in the Equinox vs
Eclipse repos largely depends on a) how speculative the work is and b)
who is doing the work.  We intend to remain as flexible as possible
in this area.

Since the bulk of the work items have
been complete the project resources (CVS, Bugzilla, ...) should be cleaned
up and prepared for new work.  In particular:
- repopulate the repository with the
Eclipse R3.0 code as required (note that this should be done in a different
directory structure under the org.eclipse.equinox folder to reduce confusion)

- move the Equinox bugs to a to be created
Platform Runtime component (the exact details are being ironed out)

- scrub the committer list.  Over
the past year+ we added a number of committers to look at specific work
items or areas.  For the most part, these items are complete and the
committers are no longer active.  The committer list will be reduced
to include only those making commitments to work on items with specific
plans.  The committer list was always intended to be quite dynamic
both in additions and deletions.  Removal from the list now in no
way prohibits subsequent readdition.  I will discuss their status
with each committer over the next few days.

- scrub the website. The website was
at best sporatically maintained.  The result is an obsolete and rather
incoherent mass of content.  Over the next few days I will version
off and clean up the site and unlink or delete stale content.  Note
that everything is in CVS so nothing is ever deleted for real.  Going
forward we should have a plan for how to evolve the site content in a more
coherent way.  Your suggestions are most welcomed.

Let me know if something has been missed
or you have any questions or concerns in this area.

Again, thanks to everyone for the hard
work.  We have definitely left Eclipse better than we found it.

Jeff