Amalgam is different than most Eclipse projects in that its deliverables are EPP and product-based builds of several Modeling projects. While some UI and integration code is provided, it is not made available in the traditional runtime, SDK, doc, etc. individual downloads.
As this is the first release of Amalgam, no compatibility issues exist.
The Eclipse Platform is designed as the basis for internationalized products. The user interface elements provided by the Eclipse SDK components, including dialogs and error messages, are externalized. The English strings are provided as the default resource bundles. As a result, the Amalgam project will provide English strings in its default bundles and be localized to a subset of those locales offered by the Platform and provided by the Babel project. This plan will be updated to indicate which locales will be provided and the time frame for availability.
In order to remain current, each Eclipse release targets reasonably current versions of the underlying operating environments. The Amalgam project depends upon on the Platform and other projects, which are mostly "pure" Java. The 3.6 release of the Eclipse Platform Project is written and compiled against version 1.4 of the Java Platform APIs, and targeted to run on version 1.4 of the Java Runtime Environment, Standard Edition. Amalgam will target the same Java version as EMF and other Modeling projects, which currently require Java 5. Eclipse Platform SDK 3.6 will be tested and validated on a number of reference platforms. Amalgam will be tested and validated against a subset of those listed for the platform. Those available will be presented on the project download site.
Usability
As one of the main purposes of Amalgam is to improve usability of Modeling technologies from Eclipse, it is a major theme for this and subsequent releases. This release is focused on providing a consummable modeling package and federating Eclipse Modeling Projects through a discovery UI integrated in the package.
- emft search proposal to be part of amalgamation epp project [219054]
(target milestone: ---) - Create product-based build for a DSL Toolkit [244153]
(target milestone: 1.0 M2) - Provide a DSL Project wizard and perspective [244155]
(target milestone: 1.0 M2) - Provide organized wizard and capabilities for DSL Toolkit [244158]
(target milestone: 1.0 M4) - Create product-based build for a Modeler package [248478]
(target milestone: 1.0 M2) - Provide common UI elements [248482]
(target milestone: 1.0 M4)