Eclipse Summit Europe is almost here and I’ve been thinking a lot about the symposia and workshops running on Tuesday, October 9th. More specifically, I’ve been thining about the results. These symposia and workshops offer a great opportunity for like-minded folks to get together and discuss what’s good, what’s bad, and what we as a community can do to make things better.
One of the things that I want to do with the RCP Experiences Workshop is gather a list of ideas, requirements, thoughts, musings, and more from the community and use them as a starting point for the development of a strategy and plan for improving the Rich Client Platform (RCP) experience.
I expect that some of the results will end up as new requirements directed to the Platform project, but as I’ve stated before, I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect the Platform project to do everything. A strategy for moving forward with the RCP experience might involve the proposal of a new project that creates target runtimes and tool suites for RCP development. Consider, for example, a “runtime” package that includes the RCP as a base, but also includes the EMF and ECF runtimes (along with, possibly, some Orbit packages, like Derby). The package might also include the currently-incubating EclipseLink project. Maybe the output is some Buckminster scripts that pull the various bits together more dynamically. At this point, I’m only musing, but something like this might be a useful result of the workshop.
It feels to me that it has potential to be the start of something big, bold and new. Remember that, to attend the RCP Experience Workshop, you only need to show up; no position paper is required.
