| [platform-vision] Meeting minutes (and more), September 10/2014 |
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Greetings folks. Based on feedback, I'm going to set: Wednesday, at 12 pm Noon (Eastern) as our regular time slot. Based on the Doodle Poll, it looks like Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning, and Thursday afternoon are our best bets for connecting face-to-face. I'll connect with Anne to see what are options are with regard to space in those time periods. In attendance: Tyler Jewel Alex Kurtakov John Arthorne Wayne Beaton If I've misrepresented anything, please correct. Tyler laid out some values/attributes/guiding principles to consider while constructing the vision. He mentioned on the call that he had captured this and would disseminate it to the group (so I'm only providing point form below). * Extensibility of developer tools * Decoupling/Atomic micro services * Ecosystem of editors: desktop/browser/CLI e.g. edit in Eclipse, move to Che * Multiple people on project using different editors * New form of extensibility: update/extend atomic services * Arbitrary workflows * Developers use only the tools that they want * New world of extensibility Microservices was a big topic of discussion. A developer's environment will be a collection of microservices working together with loose coupling on the backend with tight integration on the frontend. Products are a composition of microservices. We talked briefly about distribution of microservices. Are they all hosted by a single provider or is there a collection of hosts? Getting the integration of microservices right is a time-consuming process. Aside: the notion of loose coupling and tight integration are well known in Eclipse Platform/RCP development, so this is not a new concept. Cloud/microservice-based implementations, however, will certainly be different. We talked about the evolution of the notion of a plug-in. Today, we use the terms plug-in and bundle interchangeably. We discussed how the concept of a plug-in is actually bigger than that when you consider examples like the integration of services running in the cloud. An OSGi bundle might be the integration point between an Eclipse-based IDE and the service, but the service and the collection of technologies that provide various integrations of that service are collectively the "plug-in". Perhaps we need a new word. Aside: I tend to think of plug-ins as being a larger concept than an OSGi bundle. There are, for example, certain combinations of bundles that must be used together; these collectively are smaller than an Eclipse Feature, but bigger than individual bundle. We discussed the term "Cloud IDE". Tyler is concerned that the term is bound to the desktop notion of an IDE. I believe that there is concensus that this may be a losing battle. Provision, share, and scale are notions that do not apply to the desktop. Development Environment vs. Developer's Environment. I'll admit that I don't quite remember the distinction; Tyler can you provide some insight here, please? Only individuals with "skin in the game" (i.e. those who are willing/able to contribute real resources to implementing the vision) can contribute to to the vision/strategy. Participation in this list is restricted to those individuals. There were no suggestions regarding who we should invite to join; this will be a recurring discussion on our future calls. We need a means of collecting input from the community. Much of the discussion on the call was concerned with the cloud space. The vision/strategy must acknowledge a vibrant and growing desktop IDE space. The notion of leveraging microservices applies equally well to the desktop and cloud. Java 9 modularity is going to play a significant part in the future of Java development environments in general, and the PDE in particular. Tooling service from the desktop and cloud. We should set as a goal to be the "best Java IDE out there". Aside: based on what I've seen lately, this won't be true without investment in Maven support. It may be time to start dropping support for some platforms (Eclipse Platform-specific). My summary of the (three years into the) future vision so far: * Desktop IDE is vibrant and growing * We own the cloud-based developer environment space * Best Java 9 developer environments available * Developers can work interchangeably between desktop and cloud-based environments (e.g. common project metadata) * Microservices-based architecture leveraged by desktop and cloud-based environments Let us know if I've missed something important or am misrepresenting anything. Thanks, Wayne --
Wayne Beaton @waynebeaton The Eclipse Foundation  |