Eclipse 4.0 should be about usability and integration

Eclipse 4.0 Io is probably 2 years off now (or 3, if Io will in fact be 3.5?) , considering the very precise yearly release cycle that just brought us Europa and will bring Ganymede next year. And if there are going to be some more fundamental changes in 4.0 than the releases since 3.0 have had, I think it's time to start talking about this now. Really big changes can't happen during one release cycle.

So that it's understandable where I'm coming from: I've been following the Eclipse community for the past two and a half years, as an occasional hacker, but mostly a user and a somewhat objective observer. Or at least that's what I like to think -- I'm actually a pretty big fan of Eclipse so there definitely is some bias. I heard there was some discussion on Eclipse 4.0 already during EclipseCon 2007. Sadly, I couldn't attend EclipseCon myself. Note: I'm also linking to some old related discussions in this post -- I think some of them are still valid.

Even though Eclipse is growing very fast, I think there is still a lot of untapped potential in the projects hosted by The Eclipse Foundation. That potential lies in the integration of the various tools so that they can be composed into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts -- creating synergy. To some extent this is already happening, but at the moment there are still a lot of areas where it feels like the tools should work better together, but they don't. There are endless possibilities for small improvements that span projects, but actually filling that potential may be somewhat hard to do.

The Callisto and Europa release trains have definitely been a big step in the right direction, but they have not set integration as a top priority and it would probably be too much to expect much greater strides towards this from Ganymede. But as a user, I'd like to see this become a priority for Eclipse 4.0 (or soon after). If Eclipse just keeps extending wider and wider into new, though definitely cool areas (which it must do, of course), while not paying much attention to keeping the expanding core cohesive, I fear it may eventually start losing focus.

In the past there has been some talk about "extensible frameworks and exemplary tools" and that the focus of Eclipse is sometimes a bit more on providing a platform rather than a great end-user tool. This focus may vary from project to project. But parts of Eclipse do make a great end-user tool (perhaps most notably JDT and PDE, but there are others too), and other parts less so. Of course this undoubtedly has to do with the maturity and age of the projects as it takes time to become an awesome tool.

But perhaps there should be more effort made in the area of usability and making a set of "core" projects better integrated and of a more uniform quality, whatever exactly the "core" would compose of -- probably platform + the more popular language tools + PDE + Mylyn + ECF + data + modeling + reporting + testing and some other projects as well. More focus should be put on the areas where these "core" projects touch. This would in turn probably put a lot of pressure on the platform itself, which may need to become even more flexible, even though it already is probably the most flexible and in my opinion the best application platform in the known universe.

Some examples of what I mean, but these may be somewhat superficial and don't really go deep into details:
* Mylyn bridges for more projects -- perhaps even all of the release train projects
* Taking advantage of potential communication/collaboration features offered by ECF and other projects (Corona comes to mind)
* More BIRT reports in other projects
* Make the static analysis from TPTP more prominent. IDEA has had this for years. How many users know that they can get static analysis and a profiler for Java by installing TPTP?
* Make Eclipse a competitive database design & administration tool
* Make Eclipse a competitive UML modeling tool
* ETC.

I hope not all of this will be left for vendors to do in their Eclipse based products -- that could make Eclipse itself lag behind.

Oh, and by the way, great work everyone who made Europa happen! You all deserve a vacation now, but don't go resting on your laurels! :)