| RE: [eclipse-dev] What's next for eclipse (round 2) |
> Submitter: <DaveO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Request: Ideas about rich client platform support and fine
> print about
> wordproccessing, spreadsheet and email perspectives
>
> David, are you going to help us with implementing this
> support for 3.0?
We definitely should talk about this. Some of these things are ideas we've been kicking around here at ASC for awhile now as areas we would like to see supported by SWTworkbench. Although we haven't mapped out our plan for SWTworkbench post-1.0 yet, there definitely might be some overlap here between what we want to do and some of these ideas.
On the other hand, I carefully chose the requests that I made to correspond to things that are already in the works or done: the Mozilla-based SWT component, active server-generated help, and a new component model that can support dynamically downloading plug-ins (Equinox).
Consequently, most of these things aren't new ideas, but rather an attempt to show how these ideas can be synthesized into a really powerful model that finally delivers on Netscape's original promise of a server-driven, cross-platform, rich client user experience.
So while the proposal as a whole may sound really aggressive for 3.0 (especially the word processor and spreadsheet <grin/>), we probably can do a good number of the parts for 3.0 and see how much farther we can go later.
One fairly small step that might be worth considering that would help the community participate more would be to release the current Mozilla SWT control as an experimental package similar to the OpenGL package. Preferably with a TODO file listing its known limitations. Right now I won't even start work on something like this because I know that the Mozilla SWT control already exists inside IBM and that there's been talk about releasing it.
Best regards,
Dave