Few weeks passed after EclipseCon 2008 but I'm still thinking on E4. I saw excited people around applauding demos of scripts, which changes caption color. I saw full room of people excited with demo of the editor on the web, and I believe many of them left EclipseCon feeling bright Eclipse future. I have heard from E4 gang "we do not know details but it will be cool". There was questions about 3.5, diversity, and technical problems (like event handing), but to the best of my knowledge no one asked E4 gang: "guys, why do you so happy? do not you think E4 is very late?.. probably too late".
As for me - I left EclipseCon with dark thoughts about Eclipse future. There are two names made me unhappy: WPF and JavaFX. Nevertheless I'm aware of WPF and JavaFX exists I did not paid attention to them. After looking inside I started trust Sun/MS marketing people and
believe that any of these two technologies can start new age in
building user interfaces. Both WPF and JavaFX very similay and both are definitely rethinked how UI shall be developed. I feel that Microsoft and Sun went far ahead SWT (as well as ahead other "classic" widgets based OS UI).
For me eclipse is everything during past 5 years: my work, my hobby, my hopes... I can find everything I need among Eclipse technologies. If I can't find anything I can develop it. After looked at JavaFX/WPF - I can't imaging anything better, but I can't have such technologies in my eclipse-oriented world. Most disappointing to my totally eclipsed mind that I can have them now, but out of eclipse. In 2008 I can start programming with WPF/JavaFX and provide UI designer with top-notch tooling. While E4 is just an incubation community-driven project at warming up stage, well funded and formed teams at Sun and Microsoft worked hard on new UI development concepts for past years. They done, E4 did not started.
Folks, we talking about to run E4 on desktop OSes and to support web runtimes such as Flash, they own that runtimes (Java and WPF/Silverlight); we talking about new programming models for UI; they own new technologies introducing new programming concepts for UI (JavaFX Script and WPF/XAML) and these programming models doing a lot intersting things in terms of databinding, event processing, UI composition, rendering, and performance optimizations - E4 did not face that problems in practice yet. We predict to have something (hope "something" will include great UI tooling) in 2010 - Sun and Microsoft releasing tools for their technologies in 2008. Microsoft already shipping Microsoft Expression WPF tooling and we're awaiting JavaFX design tools, which will be interoperable with Adobe products this year.
I did shared my concerns with a friend (who is an eclipse committer). I told, hey I'm frustrating how eclipse is far from what I saw in WPF and JavaFX. The answer was: It's OK - Eclipse is a conservative platform... This is contrary to my understanding of Eclipse during past years - I was thinking Eclipse is an innovative platform.....
5 years ago SWT was a best choise for me: it was much rich compating to AWT and much faster comparing to early Swing. Now SWT looks like dinosaur comparing to WPF and JavaFX. Do you think it's possible to jump into this running train? Will be there a switch to JavaFX? For now it looks like Eclipse do not even bother to catch it. If there will be no switch to JavaFX, can Eclipse Foundation commit enough resources to develop alternative but comparable technology (SWT+? RAP 2.0?) and relevant tooling?
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