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Bug 325654

Summary: Some documentation and Adopter's Guide needed for early adoption
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Stefan Mücke <s.muecke>
Component: UIAssignee: Platform-UI-Inbox <Platform-UI-Inbox>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3 CC: bokowski, bsd, deepakazad, emoffatt, Lars.Vogel, nobody, pwebster, remy.suen, tom.schindl
Version: 4.1   
Target Milestone: 4.3 M4   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:
Attachments:
Description Flags
Initial documentation plugin with an outline
none
Screenshot of proposed outlline none

Description Stefan Mücke CLA 2010-09-17 16:57:50 EDT
Created attachment 179152 [details]
Initial documentation plugin with an outline

DOCUMENTATION. Currently, information about Eclipse 4 is scattered all over the Web (blogs, tutorials, presentations, ...). There's a bunch of wiki pages with mostly internal discussions and to-dos, but this is not sufficient as a source of information. Wiki pages lack structure. They don't give you an idea of "what's in", and so you have to find out yourself; this costs way too much time.

I think there should be at least some documentation (even for early adopters) with a few short sentence about every important topic (e.g. model modification, selection listeners), and a few lines of example code. This should be possible to produce within one or two days of work.

To show you that I am serious about this point, I have compiled a documentation plugin that could be as a starting-point or as a source for inspiration (currently mostly an outline so far, compiled by brainstorming and skimming the wiki pages). Note: I have used the structure of the Eclipse 3.x SDK documentation to make it easy to merge the documentation later.

ADOPTER'S GUIDE. To make it easy for people to begin adoption, there needs to be some guide explaining what needs to be changed (or NOT) to adopt Eclipse 4.
       
Some important questions to be answered:

- Which APIs will be deprecated? Which are considered old-style?

- Which APIs are not supported by the compatibility platform?

- Is the compatibility platform meant for RCP applications?
  (Why is there a "LegacyIDE.e4xmi" file instead of "LegacyWorkbench.e4xmi"?)

- Do RCP applications need to implement their own workbench
  if they want to be "native" Eclipse 4 applications?
         
- If yes, do they have to implement all the nice features themselves
  they previously got for free (like DnD of parts and trims, ...)?

- How much adoption is necessary? Just make things work on the
  compatibility layer, or remove all references to old-style APIs?
Comment 1 Stefan Mücke CLA 2012-02-01 02:35:30 EST
Created attachment 210356 [details]
Screenshot of proposed outlline

Attached screenshot: Here's a glimpse at what is contained in the documentation plugin. I should have added this screenshot from the beginning. Sorry.
Comment 2 Brian de Alwis CLA 2012-02-01 12:28:59 EST
Stefan, take a look at the documentation at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/RCP and feel free to add and rearrange.  The current layout is modelled in part from your original outline.

(Sorry, I meant to post a reference earlier here but forgot.)
Comment 3 Lars Vogel CLA 2012-02-03 04:14:32 EST
@Stefan: I will be soon publish a book about Eclipse 4 and hope that it will provide good reference material as well as good examples. I will not focus very much on the Adapters of Eclipse 3.x but present the material completely for a new starter.

Otherwise I think all topics from your agenda will be covered.
Comment 4 Nobody - feel free to take it CLA 2012-02-03 04:28:06 EST
@Lars Looking forward for your publication.

I also think the 4th edition of Eclipse Plugins book will be about Eclipse 4 as I've read here http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Plug-ins-4th-Eric-Clayberg/dp/0321774159/ , though I am not sure in what extent.
Comment 5 Lars Vogel CLA 2012-11-29 12:32:40 EST
Stefan, I hope you don't mind that I close this bug as fixed. AFAIK there is no one planning to work on a different structured information. We still have the wiki, several tutorial sides and at least two books (one German and one English). I think is pretty good as Eclipse 4 was just released a few month ago.