We’ve been a bit silent in the last few months but the reason is not that our investment in e(fx)clipse has been stopped – it’s the complete opposite. We are involved in HUGE JavaFX projects built on top of e4 and JavaFX.

At EclipseCon Europe I gave a talk on the future direction of e(fx)clipse who is driven by 3 main topics who are going build the Foundation for a bright future of e4 on JavaFX:

• Freedom of development style
• Freedom of development tool
• Freedom of runtime

Freedom of development style

As of today e(fx)clipse e4 development style is called “MANIFEST-first” which means you create your OSGi-MANIFEST and from there

• Eclipse PDE derives Classpaths, … while you are in your Eclipse IDE
• Eclipse Tycho derives Build-Paths, … to build applications on your CI-Instance

In future we are going to support other development styles as well:

• bnd/bnd-tools for those of you who’d like to use what OSGi-gurus like Peter Kriens, Neil Bartlett, … prefer for OSGi-Development, we are already publishing an r5-index since some time. A nice side effect is that bnd support is also available eg in IntelliJ IDEA
• pom/gradle-first for those of you who’d like to stay with maven/gradle but not all team-members are using Eclipse as their main IDE (or you are not using OSGi as the module system of choice – see more on that below)

Freedom of development tool

Since the first day I’ve spoken about “e4 on JavaFX”, I said that we – the e(fx)clipse project – don’t mind people using other IDEs like Netbeans or IntelliJ IDEA because we are an RCP framework allowing you to built sophisticated applications on top of the brand new Eclipse 4 Application Platform and if you don’t like the Eclipse IDE that’s fine with us.

Yes one part (the smaller one) of the Eclipse-project provides tooling to support developers who’ve chose Eclipse as the IDE, and yes we are an Eclipse project (like Jetty, Vert.x) and Eclipse is our primary development environment but just because it is our IDE of choice this must not mean that it is yours as well.

People already managed to use e(fx)clipse to develop application inside IntelliJ IDEA but in future we’d like to provide all developers an excellent out-of-the-box experience.

Freedom of Runtime-System

As of today you can run e4 applications only on the Eclipse Equinox OSGi-Container. In future we’d like to provide you many more options:

• Run on ANY r5-OSGi-Container
• Run without OSGi using NO Module-Container at all
• Run on Java Platform Module System (JPMS)

Don’t get me wrong! We love OSGi and support for OSGi is still one of the primary targets of e(fx)clipse but we also understand the OSGi might not be the right tool for you and your team.

What’s next

As you might imagine all this is a HUGE amount of work but we (BestSolution.at) are committed to the future e(fx)clipse and we think it is crucial for e(fx)clipse’ future and initial steps have already been made.

Stay tuned for more exciting news in the next few weeks.