Re: [nebula-dev] Future of Nebula

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My analysis for this is the following:

> Widget authors are pretty much individualists. We have many widgets and many authors but there is not sense of a "one product" like you would have for other projects. Every widget is more or less self sustained. Hence there is no "us".

> Most widgets are feature complete. They have a described function and there is no reason to evolve this from year to year.

I agree with that. Nebula is just an "aggregation" of individual widgets. It's not a real project (refering to the usual definition of project) since there is no global roadmap and objectives. 1 widget == 1 (mini) project.
But the current approach is actually working well since it fits contributors and consumers wishes.

> Feedback from the external community (consumers). I hear of many people consuming Nebula widgets, but there is not a desire or need to provide feedback apart from the occasional bug request.

I agree with that. Nebula widgets are usually good quality and we can find documentations and snippet about how to use them. I guess a majority of the Eclipse-based RCP apps have used Nebula widget. I'm also sure that if a "complete" widget has a bug and needs a contribution, we can easily find someone to fix it (inside or outside of the known contributor set).

Conclusion: Having these thoughts, I think we are better of being as we were, a perpetual incubation project.

Incubation is actually a cool status, it makes things easier sometimes. For Nebula, I also don't think there is a big benefit in turning it into a released project. But there is no issue in being a release neither...

I was also thinking to broaden the scope of Nebula and make it a home for widgets of other technologies like Swing, JFace, RAP and _javascript_.

That's a good idea.
I hope in most cases, SWT/JFace based widget would work with RAP. By the way, we should try to provide an RAP version of the Nebula examples.
About Swing and _javascript_ in general, I'm not sure Nebula (and Eclipse in general) is the place where contributors would like to contribute the most...
However, it would make a lot of sense to make Nebula host some high-level widgets dedicated to Orion.

Move back to incubation?

I would vote 0.

What would you improve in Nebula?

Showcase it on RAP.

Do you think the project is still relevant?

Yes, definitely.

What do you think about adding other technologies besides SWT?

I would vote +1 for Orion-based stuff, -1 for the other ones.


Also, Wim, I hope you'll submit an overview of Nebula for EclipseCon France (deadline is April 15th) ;)

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets