Umm, not so much
James Governor makes a small error in describing a putative Eclipse evangelist:
I can easily imagine a really excellent Eclipse RCP blog that was not written from a developer perspective, but that of an end user. So Ryan makes a great point but I would probably not be so binary. Authority and credibility comes in many different shapes and sizes. It increasingly comes from communities of interest, rather than "top down high church you shall obey" certifiers (Pace Michael Lewis and Stephen Johnson). High priest geeks are still high priests, and those are the folks we need to keep on their toes, regardless of the field of authority.
Eclipse's end users are developers, given the nature of Eclipse. IMHO, any non-developer evangelist for Eclipse would not be useful at the end user level - what information of use would they convey?
Comments
umm - RCP stands for rich client platform?
[James Governor] June 22, 2005 13:27:00.410
i dont think i did, sir. have you looked at RSSOwl? Or the new Lotus clients ed brill is getting so much traffic over? what could they confer? hey look at this cool stuff. hey here is a neat application using RCP. hey i used to HATE Lotus Notes but this new stuff isn't so sucky. do i have to be a smalltalk developer to use bottom feeder? if so you expect minimal (certainly niche) adoption; open source or not. right? you will be telling me end users couldnt give useful input to Flash developers next... your statement "given the nature of Eclipse" indicates a misunderestimation of what the nature of Eclipse is. It is not just an IDE. that was last year. it is becoming a client side presentation and widget framework too.
Hmm
[ James Robertson] June 22, 2005 13:42:22.449
Comment by James Robertson
Well yeah, if you want to extend BottomFeeder with a plugin, you have to use VisualWorks Smalltalk. I haven't looked that seriously at Eclipse as a client platform, that's true. It seems awfully "stout" for that though. So far as I can tell, plugging a client application into Eclipse would be akin to doing that in a VW development environment - possible, and easily extensible (for a developer). But also bigger than I'd want as a client tool.
Umm, not so much
[ alan knight] June 24, 2005 11:22:52.450
Comment by alan knight
Eclipse is very, very plugin-oriented, so at least in theory, can be trimmed down or fattened up fairly arbitrarily. My impression of "Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform" is that it essentially means SWT plus the basic plugin engine, with the ability to bring in extra plugins that are appropriate as necessary. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Kind of like using various VisualWorks libraries in a deployed application. Of course, the devil is in the details, especially when it comes to keeping things small.