The Road to Eclipse 4

This week, EclipseCon 2008 takes place at Santa Clara, California. Not all of us are fortunate to have the means or sponsors to participate. One of the interesting sessions will be an open discussion of the future of Eclipse 4, aka "e4". Since I won't be able to participate, here's some of my opinions on the future of the platform.

The Future of Desktop Apps and Eclipse

IMHO, Eclipse RCP today is probably the best framework for cross-platform desktop apps development. It's simple: if you want true cross-platform development, Java is your best bet. If you're writing a desktop app in Java, Eclipse is your best option for a decent UI. Almost every time I see a new cross-platform desktop application written in Java but not using Eclipse, my immediate reaction is "it's so ugly, why didn't they use Eclipse?". I've seen Eclipse RCP based applications which look so good that it's hard to tell that Java is behind the scenes (e.g. XMind).

There's a bigger question: what's the future of desktop apps?  I don't want to open the debate, but it is my opinion that they're not dead yet. Nevertheless, products like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR, are a big threat to Eclipse in this area. They provide the richness and ease of development of a desktop app with the deployment capabilities of an online app.

Consider this: you'll be able to use simple tools like Visual Basic to develop a rich desktop application and then deploy it over the web to your users and run it on multiple platforms. If Eclipse plans to stay in this game, this means that developing an Eclipse application should be as easy as developing a Visual Basic one. I'm talking about wizards, WYSIWYG editor, etc. It's possible that we will never get there, and that's fine. However, the focus should shift back from Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform to Eclipse as (the best) IDE.

Top Five Challenges for Eclipse 4

Performance - speed of execution, responsiveness of the platform and memory footprint. This has always been the Achilles Heal of Eclipse. It must be improved. I don't care how. Write a dedicated JVM optimized for Eclipse. Just make it work.

Easier Deployment - installation, automatic updates, plug-ins installation, configuration sharing between team members. It simply doesn't work well. No wonder there's a market for "Eclipse Distributions" like Genuitec Pulse. Take an application which works well with updates and add-ons, like Firefox, and follow its' model.

Cool UI - I want rich UI in my IDE. I want animations, fading elements and cover flow. As a plug-in developer, I want an arsenal that will enable me to quickly create an application that will dazzle my users. Spend some time on a Mac OS X and you'll quickly see my point.

Better Customization (for the end-user) - I want to change my toolbar, change my menus, record and edit scripts to automate repetitive tasks. I want these changes to apply to new workspaces that I open. I want to be able to share my scripts with teammates. Oh, I should be able to do that without reading a book about it.

Documentation - As a plugin developer, I often find myself struggling to get my hands on decent and up-to-date developer documentation. Code should not be allowed into production without proper documentation. This includes not only Javadoc, but also proper online help, tutorials and reference. Moreover, the information should be easily accessible from the IDE. I think about how easy it was to get this information in Visual Studio.  Follow this model.

This is from the top of my head. What's on your list?  the comments are open.