Re: Eclipse 3.2 support

From: Pete Helgren

Ah, they need a more simple and modular design then!  The MyEclipse
folks and other Eclipse based tools seem to keep pace with the revs in
Eclipse. Although, in defense of your comments Joe, the My Eclipse
plugin at  207MB is relatively "svelte" when compared to the 1+GB sized
WDSC.  It must be a beast to maintain.

There are a number of things at work here, Pete, most of which I can't
really address; they're more something that someone from the team might want
to chime in on.  But at least one issue is that the iSeries pieces in
particular come from a heavy legacy background (thus the fact that they
can't run on Linux, for instance).  I'm hoping that one of the goals in a
future release is to release the Windows restriction.

Seems to me though that if the beast can't be tamed, then perhaps a
different maintenance methodology should be examined. Eclipse 3.0 was
announced June, 2004 and here we are two years later and as far as I
understand it, still quite a ways from anything that will use a newer
version of Eclipse.

I guess the question is, why should it?  The change from 2.1 to 3.0 of
Eclipse, especially in the UI, was gigantic.  Not so much the change to 3.1
and even less the change to 3.2.  I'm in no way trying to soft-pedal the
amount of work that's gone into Eclipse in those releases, but at the same
time, what specific bits of Eclipse do you need in WDSC other than
integration with the latest Open Source tool of your choice?  And think
about it: why would IBM be in a hurry to support Hibernate (rather than DB2)
or Struts (rather than JSF) or Swing (rather than SWT)?

Hey, I'd like the base Eclipse to support the iSeries... why aren't they
doing that?

2 years in computer years is what, 20 years in
human years? At this rate in 5 more years we'll be comparing WDSC to
current Eclipse based technology like we now compare SEU to WDSC.
They'll be saying "You *still* use WDSC?  That old thing! Use something
more modern!" ;-)

Yeah, I'll say that about the time that base Eclipse has support for RPG and
debugging ILE programs. 

Seriously, it may be that the WDSC team being heavily invested in
Eclipse 3.0 is more a function of the team knowing Eclipse 3.0 since IBM
was deeply invested in the Eclipse platform development before it was
handed off to the consortium in Feb 2004.  Maybe they are tweaking
Eclipse 3.0.X to their liking rather than using the consortium to
enhance the base platform?

I'm pretty sure that's way off the mark, Pete.  Let's not forget that
significant bits of Eclipse are still coming from IBM... can you say RSE?

Again, like I said before.  No big deal in practice.  I can use two
versions of Eclipse and two workspaces.  Consolidation of the two would
be nice, but I'll keep using WDSC, regardless of what version of Eclipse
WDSC uses, now or in the future.

Me too.  I still play with Eclipse.  As I said, I'm pretty impressed with
the whole Callisto concept.  But at the same time, I'm really quite
impressed with what WDSC has to offer.  Different tools for different jobs.

Joe