on Jul 29th, 2009Nomenclature and the Evolution of Eclipse
One of the great things about Eclipse is that it evolves, it’s not static. We reinvent ourselves.
From IDE to RCP to Runtime. From Platform to e4 (e.g., the future).
When we evolve, it gives us an opportunity to think about our lexicon.
I recently sent an email to the Eclipse PMC entertaining the idea of deprecating our usage of the word ‘plug-in’:
On last week’s Eclipse Architecture team call, I brought up the ‘plug-in versus bundle’ naming issue. This naming issue also came up at this week’s PDE team call where we had consensus that deprecating the word plug-in would be a good idea. Furthermore, the new components in PDE (e.g., API Tools) have gone out of their way to not call things plug-ins. I also know the Equinox p2 team struggles with naming problems (e.g., calling things software).
…
My proposal is that we adopt “bundle” and deprecate “plug-in” as the official module term.
If you’re interested in this, please comment on this bug. There’s also another bug open that wants to rename RCP if you’re interested in that too.
I would like to hear from the Eclipse and OSGi communities on what they think. Good or bad idea?
Would you welcome the change?
Related posts:
Internally and when the audience is plug-in/bundle developers, I guess it’d be OK. However, to Joe EclipseUser I think it would be a mistake to switch to “bundle.” Everyone knows what a “plug-in” is, many applications that users touch every day use that nomenclature. If we started calling them bundles now, I think we’d get a lot of “Huh?”s and have a long period of explanation, where the conversation would usually go something like:
“Huh? What’s a ‘bundle” thingy?”
“Oh, that’s just a plug-in.”
“OK. Why don’t they just call it a plug-in?”
“It’s complicated.”
My thought is: why deprecate ‘plug-in’ instead of deprecating ‘bundle’? Eric has the same thought as I.
Let’s stick to OSGi spec, I vote for deprecating plugin
Just this week I had a usability training. One of the things it said: You as a software developer create an application to provide some functionality. But when you create the UI for that application, you have to build an entirely different second thing: A much smaller _model_ of your application. And that model should be build from the users perspective, not the developers perspective. Therefor it shall use terminology that a user understands.
Given that, “plug-in” is what you need to show in the UI. The user doesn’t know “bundles”, he doesn’t know OSGI (and he has the right to not know it!). A user of eclipse isn’t necessarily a developer nowadays with all those RCP applications…