Eclipse Equinox 4.7.0 (Oxygen)

4.7.0 (Oxygen)

Description

The Equinox 4.7 release continues to focus on implementing the latest Core OSGi specification and selected OSGi Compendium and Enterprise services.  The final OSGi R6 Core specification went final in June 2014 and can be found here.  The OSGi R6 Compendium and Enterprise specifications went final in July 2015 and can also be found here.  The Equinox 4.7 release includes a full implementation of the R6 Core Framework as well as several compendium and enterprise service implementations.  Many of the Equinox specification implementations from this release are used as the Reference Implementations for the OSGi R6 specification.

The OSGi R7 specification is currently underway, but the final release date is not set and may get delayed beyond the Oxygen.0 release date.  Equinox 4.7 (Oxygen.0) will remain at the OSGi R6 level of the specification.

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues
  • This release is largely considered a maintenance release of the Core Framework.
    • No new OSGi Core specification has been released since the last Equinox release.
    • Full implemention the OSGi R6 Core Framework specification
  • The Equinox Declarative Services implementation is now using Apache Felix SCR implementation which provides an OSGi R6 implementation of Declarative Services.
  • Other components in Equinox have mainly had bug fixes only.
Non-Code Aspects
  • The 4.6 release will contain updated User and ISV documentation
  • Community is active
    • Mailing lists and newsgroups have steady activity
      • equinox-dev@eclipse.org, eclipse-dev@eclipse.org, p2-dev@eclipse.org
  • Steady flow of bugzilla reports

  • Internationalization

    • Latin1 and Latin2 locales supported in all operating 

      environments

    • DBCS locales supported on all platforms

    • GB18030-1 Chinese codepage standard is supported 

      on Windows, Linux GTK and Mac

  • Localization

    • Tested for localization

  • Accessibility

    • Tested for accessibility, but Equinox has minimal UI.
Usability Details

Equinox has very little UI.  The most noteable UI is in p2.

End of Life
  • When evolving API the Equinox Project will, whenever possible, deprecate the affected API methods and continue to keep them operational
  • Exceptions to this rule are in the 4.7 migration guide
  • No API deprecations to note for this release

 

Standards
  • OSGi
    • Equinox Core Framework Specification, Release 6
    • Service Compendium Specification, Release 6
  • Continued development of the next OSGi specification
  • Many Equinox components provide reference implementations to the OSGi Alliance
    • The Declarative Services implementation is no longer the reference implementation for the OSGi R6 specification.  Equinox now uses Apache Felix SCR implementation.

 

Communities
  • The Equinox project is developed using an open, transparent, and inclusive process
  • Teams rely on Bugzilla, mailing list and newsgroups for input
  • Between June, 2016 and May 2017 (RC2)
    • More than 300 reports were created
    • Over 233 were resolved
    • 30 were backported to 4.6 (Neon)
    • 42 were resolved without a code change
      • invalid, duplicate, worksforme, etc
  • Equinox team members are active in Bugzilla, newsgroup, mailing lists and IRC
  • Using the equinox-dev IRC channel
    • irc://irc.freenode.net/#equinox-dev
    • also see: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/IRC
  • The Equinox team participates in code camps, conference presentations, and tutorials, including
  • EclipseCon, OSGi DevCon, JavaOne etc.

  • The Equinox team interacts with other open source projects, standards bodies, and other projects on eclipse.org, including

    • OSGi Alliance, Apache Aries, Apache Felix
Subprojects included with this release
Equinox Bundles
Equinox Framework
Equinox p2
This release is part of Eclipse Oxygen