[pdt-dev] PDT 8 and/or 9 plan

[Dawid Pakuła <zulus@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Despite to GitHub move I have couple plan for future releases.

Since couple releases, thanks to hard teamwork, PDT is finally fast enough to consume a lot of large projects in one single workspace.

But in meantime we started to spinning around, new features often require lot’s of workaround, bypass DLTK/WTP, etc.. 

It’s not direct problem of DLTK, but PHP evolve a lot since 5.4 and they haven’t plan to stop  (PHP 8.0 will have attributes!!! :P).

So, I think it’s time to start dropping DLTK as language support skeleton.

I would like to have 2 kind of PHP projects:

1. Strict structure, fully controlled by composer (or anything else) and it’s configuration, where PDT will be able to correctly validate files, or react for file move

2. Weak structure, where everything is indexed, class path validation even if exists, it can be only on selected folders.

In both cases we need much simpler model without garbage from Java models container, class folders, external containers etc..

Also completely independed to indexing and searching.

PHP model should be based on handly with ability to register alias, traits and others. This later allow us to simplify project import/creation, and later maybe ability to prepare PDT-LS for VSCode fans ;)

Without this we will fall, even on GitHub :P

Off course some DLTK elements will be still valuable like Type Inference, Low-level indexing etc…

During this process I plan to re-implement Twig/Doctrine/Symfony support (this projects are maintained by me only) and add to PDT Core as example how PDT should/could be extended.

If we find volunteer, maybe other popular projects will add out-of-box support to PDT.

Maybe later we will try to untick from WTP (CSS/HTML code assist in php file) but for me is not priority now.

Any thoughts?