E4/Meeting Minutes/Status 20081016

Attendees

• Boris Bokowski
• Eric Moffatt
• Jochen Krause
• John Arthorne
• Kevin McGuire
• Martin Oberhuber
• Michael Scharf
• Mike Wilson
• Paul Webster

Status

• McQ
  • e4 getting more visibility within IBM and elsewhere, which is good for funding but also consumes his resources, and might lead to efforts swaying the work into directions less focused
• Jochen
  • Looking at e4 demo code and ensuring it plays well with RAP.
• Martin
  • Looking at resource work
  • Investigation of EFS, Java 7 I/O APIs, asynchronous file system APIs
  • Investigation of symbolic link cycles / alias management
  • Considering the idea of lazily populated resource trees
    • What is the user model, do they have to explicitly populate sub-trees?
  • Discussion on bloat
• Michael
  • Looking at declarative UI work
  • Want to find a common solution that takes the best ideas from current systems out there
• Kevin
  • Did demo of SWT browser edition, styled text running in a web browser, IDE in a web browser, flickr running on WPF.
  • Idea of getting reuse of code across Web-based and rich client applications resonating well
  • McQ raised idea of running RAP inside a portion of a web page, portal style
• Paul
  • Investigating making core expressions use javascript or Java
  • Also want to look at undo/redo story in commands
• Eric
  • Working on the compatibility layer
    • Created a Wiki page here
    • Looking at how to manage extensions in a standardized manner
    • Checking which public API is needed to support the JDT
• Boris
  • Looking at UI model. More strict typing.
  • ESE symposium abstract. Please talk to Boris if you have ideas, or plan to participate.
• John
  • Participating in various discussions in E4 resources and elsewhere
  • Second draft of extension registry work in progress. Want to ensure what we produce here is relevant to e4 code base, solves real problems. Aim is to reduce code bloat for clients of extension registry.

Discussion

Declarative UI:

• There will be a declarative UI round-up call
• Continue declarative UI discussion at e4 symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe.
• Need to answer question: What is the value add of declarative UI?

Architectural direction:

• Need to focus down on the high value architectural issues to target
• Can't solve all the world's problems
• Need to start producing a project plan to help focus efforts

• Event storm problem
  • Currently there are thousands of events that occur when a part is activated, or item is selected
  • Want to investigate ways to reduce these event storms

• Dependency Injection
  • Helps to achieve decoupling between components, reduce singleton accessors

• Asynchronous behaviour
  • Avoid callback parameter objects
  • Help with event storm by batching and clipping redundant events
  • Device debugging field has been doing this for a long time (see device debugging doc)