Eclipse Handly™ 0.4 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.

Release

0.4

Description

Focused on API quality, this major release takes a significant step towards finalizing core Handly APIs. Also, it includes notable new features (like the model adaptation facility), additional exemplary implementations, and many enhancements.

Architectural Issues

There is no declared API in this release as both the API and the API policy may still evolve.

That being said, this release is heavily focused on API quality and takes a significant step towards finalizing core Handly APIs, a goal we'll attempt to accomplish within the 0.5 time frame (Eclipse Neon).

Due to the API rework involved, this release introduces a number of breaking changes and is expected to be much more disruptive than previous releases. We'll guide early adopters through necessary migration steps.

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 basic exemplary implementation along with a more advanced Java model example (Handly Examples). All existing artifacts are kept up-to-date.

The model adaptation example, a new exemplary implementation in this release, will demonstrate a Handly based model that plays the role of an adapter for the JDT Java model. In this release we'll also illustrate, as part of the basic example, how to represent source files that are external to the workspace.

Also available is a step-by-step guide to getting started with Handly [6] (hosted on GitHub and made available under the EPL v1.0), which has enjoyed some encouraging feedback from early adopters.

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

[2] https://hudson.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.

The project's community was promptly informed about the scope of ensuing changes in this release [5]. To provide current adopters with an opportunity to give it an early try, leave feedback or raise concerns, a milestone build (corresponding to an attempt at API freeze towards this release) was made available [6].

We also tried to get as many of the necessary API changes as possible into this release, in order to allow sufficient time for community feedback (and further changes, if necessary) before attempting to finalize core Handly APIs in the next major release (0.5, tentatively scheduled to coincide with Eclipse Neon).

The first significant contribution to the project [7] is currently pending IP review. It is kindly provided by Ondrej Ilcik, head of IDE development at Codasip. Codasip Studio is one of the earliest adopters of Handly, and it is really great to see that a major adopter becomes a significant contributor. This is a very important milestone for the project. Thanks for contributing!

[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://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/handly-dev/msg00147.html

[6] https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/handly-dev/msg00154.html

[7] https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/59925/