Core and Compat-Layer

The work done last week was fixing the most important problems before signing of M6 this weekend, so not too many great new features have been developed but the ones already availabled got polished and improved.

The most important things are:

• Editor-Activation time is reduced tremendously
• Editor Sharing problems have been fixed
• Sharing of Views like Package Explorer is available
• A new perspective switcher has been added

An 4.0 SDK running on my OS-X looks like this:

Here are the URLs for the downloading the builds and looking at the N&N for M6

• e4-Codebase (=3.x SDK + complete e4 code base (e.g. with XWT))
• Eclipse 4.0 Early Adopter SDK (=3.x SDK + compat layer + e4 core code base (e.g. without XWT))
• New and Noteworthy (will be available later today)

Take a look at 4.0 SDK FAQ to understand the relation between e4, 4.0 SDK and 3.x SDK.

ModelEditor

Some minor bug have been fixed but no great new feature has been added to not break existing functionality before the M6-Release.

Simple e4 IDE

This is a brand new category in my weekly status reports. I’ve started working on a small IDE like application which could be used to find missing wholes in our application and service model we need to address after the 4.0 release and help plug-in developers understand better how to prepare their code so that it runs on the e4-codebase without the need of a compat layer.

The main aspects of the Simple IDE Demo are:

• Write some IDE like Application
• Use git for version control
• Experiment with Workbench-Services like a central ImageService, Internationalization-Service
• Implement small examples people can look at and apply to their code
• Make some of the Views workable in 3.x, 4.0 SDK and e4 runtimes

This screenshot shows the demos current state.

The code making up the above screenshot is using pure e4-APIs but naturally it doesn’t has the same functionality as the 3.x code still even those first experiments showed me that porting over stuff from e.g. JDT-UI is not as complex as I would have expected. I currently ported the Java-Syntax-Highlighting functionality and it took me about a day to get it working (though I’ve never ever worked with JFace-Text before), porting the eGit-Import Wizard was done in about 2 hours.

If you are interested in the progress, action items or even better work on one of the action items you can take a look at the wiki-page. The current export size with git-core and jdt-core bundles is around 20 MB.