[Xswt-developer] Feedback: Should we focus on supporting RCP only?

[David J. O. <dj...@co...>]

***Prologue: ;-)

Yesterday my team's manager got us together and told us we have to work 
mandatory Saturdays.  She previously had asked us to work whatever 
weeknight overtime we could.  This is expected to continue until early 
September.  And it's in addition to my work on EclipseWorld.  :-(  
Please be patient with my lower level of activity here for the near 
future.  :-)  Thanks.

***The question:

Might we want to make XSWT support Eclipse plugins *only*?  ie: to have 
an explicit linkage to the Eclipse platform?

Maybe this sounds stupid at first glance, so please bear with me...

***The reasoning behind the question:

Maybe we don't want to try to be all things to all people.  Maybe we 
want to just recognize that Eclipse apps these days are done using RCP 
and be done with it.

Here's what this means technically:

I'm *using* XSWT for my RCP app I'm developing for EclipseWorld and am 
pretty happy with it.  There's just one catch if you want to use XSWT 
right now in an RCP appp:

RCP apps in general and Eclipse plugins in particular use a special 
custom class loader for each plugin in order to manage plugin name spaces.

So I had to create a custom EclipsePluginClassloader (or something, 
don't remember the exact name) and add a line to set the plugin 
classloader as the XSWT classloader before parsing a file.  Otherwise, 
XSWT works like a champ for RCP applications.

But this means that in order to use XSWT for RCP, you *have* to 
*manually* configure *each* XSWT instance you create with the right 
class loader so that it can load any SWT class on the current plugin's 
classpath.

If we decided to make XSWT focus purely on being an RCP solution, we 
could eliminate a bunch of ugly reflection code that I asked Hallvard to 
write a while back.  And we also could code the necessary class loading 
stuff I referred to above right into XSWT, making XSWT plug and play for 
RCP apps.  Right now, you have to configure XSWT specifically using my 
custom class loader.


What do folks think?


Regards,

Dave Orme