Flux Team,
I've taken an interest in Flux recently, and I've been playing around with it for the past few weeks. There's a lot to absorb, so bear with my if my observations are simplistic or just plain inaccurate. First, I love the architecture. I think it's absolutely the right model for transitioning to web-based development. Martin recommended that I get started with quick assist, so I used that as my launch point for digging into the code base. Should be simple, right?
Well...I quickly discovered the jdt/ui source folder on the build, and wondered why we were essentially copying code from the jdt.ui bundle and placing it in a source folder. I soon found out. At least, I think I did. When I decided to add the jdt.ui bundle to the manifest and remove jdt/ui as a source folder, my eclipse launch crashed. Hmmm. Go figure. A little research led me to this discussion here:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/flux-dev/msg00043.htmlAlso seems to be a threading constraint with the jdt.ui bundle. Undeterred, I tried deploying that same build (with the jdt.ui bundle in the manifest--no jtd/ui source folder) as a headless service and debugging remotely. I figured that this way I could discover whether some or all of the jdt.ui bundle classes could be used for our purposes outside the eclipse launch environment. Worked like a champ until I tried to hit my breakpoints. Turns out that I can't make the Flux web editor fire an event that is captured by the headless JDT service. It doesn't create projects or files, etc, for me to then step through the quick assist code.
This brings me to my next thought. Would it make sense for the web editor component of Flux to be a "module" or "sub-component" of the Orion code base? It seems that, between the jdt/ui and the web-editor, we are reproducing *a lot* of code that is not part of the Flux core value add.
Anyway, it's quite possible that my newbness has me completely off base, and I'm almost certainly not telling anyone here anything they don't already know, but I would appreciate some feedback from the more experienced members of the team to help steer me in the right direction.
I think this project has value to add to the community, and I don't mind putting in the time if someone will give me a little nudge in the right direction.
Best wishes,
Alex
