Eclipse Oomph 1.1.0 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
Release

1.1.0

Description

Oomph provides flexible tools based on extensible frameworks that complement basic functionality in the Eclipse Platform.

API Certification

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

Architectural Issues

Oomph is from the beginning designed to very modular in terms of both plugins and features. UI code is carefully separated from core/headless code. Wherever applicable implementations are separate from their APIs.

Oomph's persistency formats are designed to be evolved in the future without rendering user installations unusable, which includes model evolution support (i.e., automatic, annotation-based instance migration).

There are no architectural issues known.

Security Issues

No vulnerabilities known.

Non-Code Aspects

Oomph supports:

  • An automated build and promotion system with signing.
  • Modular help center plugins that are also promoted statically.

 

Oomph does not yet support:

  • Localization/externalization.
Usability Details

The Oomph project has a very strong focus on usability, for example it

  • carefully analyzes which functionalities should run in background jobs to not interfere with the users ongoing activities,
  • comes with no visual appearance in toolbars by default, but can be customized to each user's taste,
  • develops sophisticated dialog tray help pages, and
  • invests into new UI concepts such as buttons that become animated after a short while of user inactivity to draw attention to the most likely wanted action.
End of Life

No features (APIs or any significant user features) are being end-of-life'd in this release.

Standards

Oomph is heavily based on EMF and stores the vast majority of it's persistable state in EMF/XML models.

Communities

Oomph has already been presented at a number of EclipseCons and Eclipse Demo Camps, all with exceptionally positive feedback. In response a community of both users and commercial adopters has formed very quickly around Oomph. Good examples are these two submissions for the EclipseCon NA 2015: Eclipse + Workspace = Profiles… share it and Ready-to-use development environment for internal development and external contributors with Oomph for Bonita BPM products.

A considerable number of users is contributing in the form of bug reports, patches and Gerrit reviews and the Oomph project addresses defects and feature requests in the fastest possible way, 338 so far. As a result the number of open defects is typically less than five, just one at many times.

Oomph's newsgroup is vibrant and very responsive, with approximately 400 posts since its creation in May 2014 (5.5 months ago). Even users started to reply to the questions of other users.

Last not least, a considerable number of Eclipse projects have already contributed setup models to set up development environments for their code to Oomph's project catalog, demonstrating the value Oomph brings to both providers and users/contributors of these projects.

This release is part of Mars