Eclipse Equinox 4.5.0 (Mars) Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Project
Eclipse Equinox
Release

4.5.0 (Mars)

Description

The Equinox 4.5 release continues to focus on implementing the latest Core OSGi specification and selected OSGi Compendium and Enterprise services.  The final OSGi Core specification went final in June 2014 and can be found here.  The OSGi Compendium and Enterprise specifications will be finalized by the time the Equinox 4.5 version is released.  The draft specifications can be found here.  The Equinox 4.5 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.

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
  • New implementation of the OSGi Http Whiteboard specification.
    • The implementation supports both the old Http Service specification as well as the new Http Whiteboard specification.
    • The Http Service implementation has been rebased ontop of the Http Whiteboard implementation.
    • The Http Service implementation is backwards compatible with previous releases.
  • New Mac layout is supported by p2.  Mac users are not able to update from the previous release to 4.5 using p2 and must install from scratch.
  • The Equinox Declarative Services implementation remains at the OSGi R5 level with no plans to update to R6.  Considering replacing the Equinox implementation with the Felix implementation in the next release.
  • Other components in Equinox have mainly had bug fixes only.
Non-Code Aspects
  • A compendium OSGi specification R6 been released in time for 4.5 release
    • The new R6 Http Whiteboard specification is implemented in the 4.5 release
    • The R6 Declarative Services specification has significant changes and there is no current plans to update the Equinox implementation for R6
  • The 4.5 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 4.5 migration guide
  • No API deprecations to note for this release



 

Standards
  • OSGi
    • Equinox Core Framework Specification, Release 6
    • Service Compendium Specification, Release 5 and 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

 

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, 2014 and May 2015 (RC3)
    • More than 400 reports were created
    • Over 300 were resolved
    • 21 were backported to 4.4 (Luna)
    • 66 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 Mars