I have provided the answers below. Please refer to them as answers of the "WTP Project Leads", and if you must use names: Naci Dai (Eteration), David Williams,
As I mentioned before, we
would like to start a series of short Interviews at JAXenter (and perhaps also in
the Eclipse Magazine) about the projects which are part of Galileo. It would be
great it you could answer the following questions in a written form and send it
back to me. The idea is to give a short summary of the project and to explain
it to a broader audience (not only Eclipse specialists!):
- Can you describe the Eclipse WTP-Project in a few
words?
The Web Tools Platform (WTP) was started a mere 5 years ago to extend
Eclipse into the domain of Web applications. Since then it has become the
most popular Eclipse project.
- Can you give a typical use case for the project?
WTP provides a very rich set of tools for Web
application developers and a set of platform application programming
interfaces (API) for tool vendors.
You can download WTP and start using it right away to develop Web applications. It is also the fundamental platform that underlies many commercial development tools that are offered by vendors such as IBM, Oracle/BEA and SAP.
- What´s new in the Galileo Version of WTP?
WTP Galileo includes a brand new set of XSL Tools, providing XSL editing
and integrated debugging, numerous refinements to the _javascript_
Development Tools introduced in Ganymede, as well as improvements and
additions to its existing XML, XML Schema, JSP, HTML, CSS, and DTD
support.
Dali Java Persistence Tools has added a new and improved Entity Generation
wizard that provides greater customization of entities before they are
generated. Dali has also added advanced tooling support for EclipseLink
JPA and broad support for mapping binary content from JARs, the project
classpath, or plugins, greatly expanding the flexibility of the tooling.
Be sure to read our New and Noteworthy [1] for complete details and other
new features.
http://eclipse.org/webtools/releases/3.1.0/newandnoteworthy/
- What are the advantages of participating in the
Eclipse Galileo Release Train?
Eclipse Galileo release train is a
coordinated, simultaneous launch of a group of open-source Eclipse
projects that has become an annual event. "Galileo," is
the largest yet, comprising 33 projects and more than 24 million lines
of code. WTP is a project of significant size and complexity. Galileo allowed us to create a release that is both very stable and in sync with all the projects that we have co-dependencies.
- Which processes did you have to respect in order to
be part of Galileo?
Galileo makes it easy for all the project
to plan and execute their own development plans, by
stabilizing APIs and features in early milestones, and then fixing bugs. There is a master project plan. Each project contributes to it based on their dependencies. For example we follow the release schedule of the Eclipse platform project by a few weeks, and the projects that depend on us may follow our schedule by a few weeks. The release process is the locomotive, which pulls all the planning and development effort together.
- Where do you see the WTP-Project in one year? How
will the project evolve after Galileo?
Eclipse continues to thrive, and so does WTP project. It is obvious that Web is a part of every aspect of our lives. WTP will continue to provide the rich set of quality tools, and will continue to diversify and support for the latest standards and technologies. You will probably see many new exciting projects appear in WTP.
- Which new trends do you see in the Eclipse Ecosystem
in general and where do they lead us in the next generation 4.0 of Eclipse?
Eclipse is appearing as a runtime platform as well as being the most mature tooling platform that it is now. We will see an increasing number of technologies and solutions developed using eclipse technologies covering diverse applications from health to finance, automotive to telecommunications. Eclipse Ecosystem will follow this trend and will include people and companies that is much larger than it is today.
The e4 project is a significant re-design of eclipse; Web is an integrated part of its new design. Web concepts and technologies will be integrated into e4. They will not be add-ons. As such, e4 will be opening an exciting new frontier for WTP.
