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2.2
Eclipse ICE is a user environment and workflow engine for modeling and simulation. It includes tools for generating input, launching jobs, visualization, and data managment. It is also self-hosted and easy to extend through a standard API.
The primary features of this release, which is the first ICE release through the Foundation, is a series of great improvements to stability and API maturity.
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
The primary architectural issues of this release we around improving the developer APIs, addressing stability and addressing the requirements of the Eclipse IP process.
Eclipse ICE is a workflow environment where users can add their own actions. There are several extension mechanisms available to add workflow actions, including OSGi Declarative Services, Extension Points, and Jython classes (through EASE). The UI can be extended using OSGI Declarative Services, Extension Points or Dependency Injection.
One goal of the project is to minimize overlap with other projects, especially within the Eclipse Science Working Group. To that end, we have "spun off" the visualization components and data structures of ICE as parts of the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project and the Eclipse January (Data Structures) Project. The remaining unpaid merge debt includes figuring out how to merge our workflow engine with Triquetrum and other Eclipse workflow projects, and how we can leverage EMF Forms to generate our UI components instead of maintaining our existing UI generation code.
Most of the user documentation for Eclipse ICE is available on the Eclipse ICE wiki, https://wiki.eclipse.org/ICE. This includes tutorials, examples, and articles. Additional documentation that is used for hands on events is stored in LaTeX files in the source code repository. API Javadoc files are linked from the wiki as well.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is committing significant resources of the next month to make sure the documentation is up to date and old articles are marked.
Eclipse ICE is a standard Eclipse Workbench application and conforms to the User Interface Guidelines as far as the dev team can tell.
Over the past year we have actively engaged the community by hosting hands-on tutorials at EclipseCon, XSEDE16 and several other venues. We continue to have users join our mailing list and/or engage on GitHub. One important area for Eclipse ICE is adoption by the US Department of Energy, which has funded the project entirely, and growth there is steady. There were several peer-reviewed publications on Eclipse ICE this year and several more are in development.
We continue to participate as part of the Eclipse Science Working Group.
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