Eclipse Handly™ 1.0 Release Review

Type
Release
Graduation
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.

Release

1.0

Description

The major focus of this release is API polish and general implementation improvements in preparation for graduation from incubation. Also, the project has switched to using EPL-2.0 as its license (533855) and has provided a new exemplary implementation: LSP Example (530940).

New and Noteworthy

Migration Guide

Downloads

API Certification

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

Architectural Issues

Overall, the project code has reached a level of API stability and implementation quality that would be required for a 1.0 release. That's why the project team opted for the 1.0 release in place of the previously planned 0.9. However, a small group of bundles related to UI is still versioned as 0.9 to indicate a slim chance that their API may still change in a breaking way.

Non-Code Aspects

We still have a PMI-based website [1], CBI-based build [2], an architectural overview [3], the contributor guide [4], committer FAQ [5], and a number of exemplary implementations including a basic Xtext-based example and a more advanced Java model example (Handly Examples). This release provides a new exemplary implementation: LSP Example, which demonstrates a Handly-based model that can represent in a generic way any LSP-based source file. It is built on top of Eclipse LSP4J.

All existing artifacts are kept up-to-date. The architectural overview reflects the still current (at the time of this writing) 0.8 version and will be updated once the new version of Handly is released.

Also available is a step-by-step guide to getting started with Handly [6], which has enjoyed some encouraging feedback from early adopters. Based on the still current (at the time of this writing) 0.8 version, it will be updated to take advantage of the new version of Handly immediately after the release.

We will also provide a migration guide for current adopters in the time leading up to this release.

[1] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.handly

[2] https://ci.eclipse.org/handly/

[3] http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/handly/docs/handly-overview.pdf&r=1

[4] http://git.eclipse.org/c/handly/org.eclipse.handly.git/about/

[5] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Handly/Committer_FAQ

[6] https://github.com/pisv/gethandly/wiki

Communities

All discussion happens on open channels of developer mailing list [1], adopter forum [2] and bugzilla [3]. The project lead's blog posts on topics surrounding Handly [4] are syndicated to Planet Eclipse.

Despite its current incubation status, the project is known to be successfully used in two large-scale commercial products [5]. To encourage further adoption, the project has provided four exemplary implementations in Handly Examples, there is also a detailed getting started guide as noted above. Separately available is an experimental fork of Eclipse Java development tools based on Handly that can also serve as a realistic example [6].

The project has made 16 releases so far, including eight major releases. We believe that the project team has learned the mechanics of Eclipse Development Process well enough for the project to graduate into the mature phase.

[1] https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/handly-dev

[2] http://eclipse.org/forums/eclipse.handly

[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?product=Handly

[4] http://pisv.wordpress.com/tag/handly/

[5] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Handly/Adopters

[6] https://github.com/pisv/jdt.core-handly