Orion/Project Proposal

Introduction

The Eclipse Orion Project is a proposed open source project under the Eclipse Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. If you are intending on contributing to the project, you may also edit this proposal.

Please send all feedback to the https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/orion-dev mail list.

Background

The Eclipse platform was first targetted to building an extensible IDE component framework. It has since grown to into Rich Client Platform, enabling whole new categories of scenarios and domains. As the software landscape changes, so must the Eclipse platform in order to remain relevant and vibrant. These trend lines point to web technologies, new user interface metaphors, and distributed infrastructure. Now is the time to rethink elements of the platform so that Eclipse may remain at the forefront of application development.

Scope

The mission of the Orion project is to build ...

Specifically, efforts will be directed towards but not limited to:

The actual set of items will expand and change to reflect the interests of those who join Orion.

Also of importance are the necessary tools to be able to self-host, i.e. to develop Orion using tools based on Orion. Wherever appropriate, we will use or adapt tools that already exist in other Eclipse projects.

Additional information can be found on the Orion wiki.

Additional Details of Work Areas

<This section is for the community to provide additional work area information, either as details on the above scope or as additional areas. Please add a subsection with your name/organization and a brief description of what area you intend to work on>

Out of Scope

It is not our intention to duplicate tooling efforts underway in other Eclipse projects. Where possible and practical, we will seek reuse and collaboration.

Organization

This project is proposed under the Eclipse top-level project. Being a separate project from the existing Platform project gives it room to innovate without disruption to the ongoing 3.x stream work taking place in the Eclipse Platform project. It also welcomes a new set of contributors.

We foresee the following possible paths for the Orion project:

1. Work areas of the Orion project, as they graduate, are merged into other existing Eclipse projects
2. The project as a whole graduates as a permanent project under the Eclipse project.

These paths are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of some or all of these paths may be the result of the work done in this project.

Proposed Initial Committers

The following list consists of the current committers of the contributed Orion code, and the participants of the Orion summit that was held in Palo Alto, California, on March 17th and 18th, 2011.

• Boris Bokowski, IBM Canada - Boris is a committer on the Platform UI component. He is interested in developing a new, simpler programming model for Eclipse-based applications, and generalizing the Eclipse platform to support multiple programming languages, distributed computing, and the web. He also would like to get rid of having to write listeners in UI programming.
• Felipe Heidrich, IBM Canada - Felipe has been an SWT committer for many years. He is a jack of all trades contributing to all areas of SWT. His main focus is on StyledText and Internationalization.
• Grant Gayed, IBM Canada - Grant has been a committer on the Platform SWT component since 2001. He is interested in SWT Browser Edition.
• John Arthorne, IBM Canada - John has worked on the Eclipse project for the past decade in almost all components. In recent years he has focused on the workspace model, concurrency infrastructure, provisioning (p2), and overall platform API quality. He intends to contribute to e4 in the areas of application/service model, API design, and help out with workspace/resource changes as needed.
• Mike Wilson, IBM Canada - McQ is an Eclipse Project PMC member, representing the Platform and Incubator projects. He is also the Eclipse Project Platform UI team lead and has in the past lead the Resources, Team and SWT teams. He is a member of the Eclipse Architecture Council, and one of the original founders of Eclipse. His technical interests are programming languages, UI design, and web development. He is actively involved in the technical leadership of e4, which is one of his main focuses.
• Silenio Quarti, IBM Canada - Silenio is the technical lead for SWT. His areas of expertise include graphics, widgets, threading, optimization and operating system programming. He has been intimately involved with both the design and implementation of SWT for many years.

Interested Parties

Support has been expessed by:

• IBM

<Please add your company name here>

Relationship to other Eclipse projects

This project will be an incubator for changes to the Eclipse project platform. It may make use of tooling in other projects such as JavaScript editing in WST. It may consume components from Orbit such as Javascript support.

Code Contribution

The Eclipse Incubator project has a component named "e4". We plan to move code from that component into the new Eclipse e4 project when it has been created.

Tentative Plan

A technical preview is planned for the summer of 2011, with the first regular release tentatively scheduled for the summer of 2010.