Monday, June 27, 2011

Eclipse 4 ships with Indigo


How do we know ? Well for one thing I finally have time to start blogging...;-). This is just the first of many posts I expect to be making over the summer (and likely the least technical).

After almost 3 years of design and development the next version of Eclipse is ready for you to start using.

Is it perfect yet ? No, see the Known Issues page here but we are sure that none of these issues cannot be addressed during the 4.2 cycle. It's now time to pass the ball over to the community; we need your input to make this version of Eclipse even better..

The current PMC plans are that 4.2 should be the base platform for the Juno release and it will be our primary focus for 4.2 to ensure that this happens. Any defects found by the release train components will be top priority (actually any component, release train or not, if you're willing to spend the time testing we're ready to spend the time fixing your issues). Here's how you can help:

Testing Your Components:

We've already done our own 'ad hoc' testing of various components (CDT, Mylyn...) but only the actual component team knows enough about their features to ensure that our compatibility coverage is 100%. Testing your component in Eclipse 4 is easy (if it weren't I'd likely be updating my resume rather than writing this blog post...;-), even for something like the CDT the testing time required was under 3 hours:
  1. Download Eclipse 4.1
  2. Use it as you would normally and install / check out your component
  3. Run through a test of your component's features
    • Open any perspectives and check that everything's there
    • Ensure that all views / editors work correctly
    • Check the part's menu and toolbar items to make sure they're OK
* Please don't play the waiting game on this ("I'll let the other components go first to see what happens"). The amount of interest shown in Eclipse 4 will be a significant factor in its remaining the release train target.

We're here for you:

If you encounter any issues which prevent you from testing your component feel free to contact me directly (emoffatt@ca.ibm.com) and I'd be happy to help out in any way (including working through the issues directly with you on the phone as I did with Chris for CDT, here's his blog entry about it).

Report any defects against Eclipse -> Platform -> UI as you normally would (setting the target milestone to 4.1.1 will help us triage them). As I said above these will receive preferred treatment...It is worth noting that we are well positioned for this, the compatibility layer and the e4 core are much more compartmentalized so our ability for find and fix defects is faaar faster than the equivalent in the 3.x stream.

Also feel free to join us on IRC at '#eclipse-e4' or by posting to the mailing list 'e4-dev@eclipse.org' to join in discussions about where we should be taking the 4.x stream beyond simply being compatible or just to share anything Eclipse 4 related.

I'm really looking forward to this year and seeing Eclipse 4 mature into the IDE of the future...

Eric

OK then, time to get the word out

Hi folks ! This is just a short intro blurb to introduce my self to Planet Eclipse...I'll scandalously steal most of this from by blog bio ;-).

My name is Eric Moffatt, I'm a tech fogie, having been in the User Interface arena for over 30 years (40 if you include the fact that my second ever program, Dartmouth Basic on a teletype, printed a triangle of asterisks). If we fast forward a bit I'm now an IBM employee and I've been a committer on the Eclipse Platform UI team since Eclipse 3.0 (and love it!).

I've also been involved with 'e4' since the original summit in 2008 and I'm an e4 committer as well as being the Eclipse 4 SDK development lead. This, of course, is what has brought me to the blogosphere...getting the word out about Eclipse 4.

I'll be immediately following this post with the first of quite a few specifically targeted at Eclipse 4 architecture and features. Various blog topics have been building up while I've been focused on the Eclipse 4.1 release, finally I have the time to put them together.

Eric