Eclipse Equinox 3.9.0

3.9.0

Description

See the Equinox Kepler release plan document.

API Certification

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

Architectural Issues
  • The Equinox Core OSGI Framework now requires Java 5
  • Many Equinox components now require Java 5
  • No longer use jsr14 compiler option to down compile Java 5 source to Java 4.  This was the main reason many Equinox components moved up to Java 5
  • Parts of Equinox depend on Jetty 8 which required Java 6
Non-Code Aspects
  • No new OSGi specification is available for the Kepler release
    • This release of Equinox is largely being treated as a maintenance release
    • Several new features are included in p2 for shared install scenarios and remediation
  • The Kepler 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
  • Presentations and BOFs at EclipseCons
  • 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.
  • p2 UI has had several small enhancements to help improve the user experience.
    • Remediation has been added to assist users when an install operation goes wrong and guides the users to a possible solution.
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 3.9 migration guide
  • No API deprecations to note for this release
  • Several planned deprecations coming for the next release (Luna)
    • Equinox state/resolver API
    • Plugin converter service
    • Support for Eclipse 2.0 style plugins at runtime
Standards
  • OSGi
    • Equinox Core Framework Specification, Release 5
    • Service Compendium Specification, Release 4.3 and Release 4.2
  • Continued development of the next OSGi specification
  • Many Equinox components provide reference implementations to the OSGi Alliance
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, 2012 and May 2012 (RC2)
    • More than 500 reports were created
    • Over 330 were resolved
    • 40 were backported to Juno
    • 53 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
Equinox Security
This release is part of Kepler