Comments on: Nomenclature and the Evolution of Eclipse

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:36:32 +0000

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…

By: Frederic

Frederic — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:16:20 +0000

Let’s stick to OSGi spec, I vote for deprecating plugin

By: Robert Konigsberg

Robert Konigsberg — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:32:34 +0000

My thought is: why deprecate ‘plug-in’ instead of deprecating ‘bundle’? Eric has the same thought as I.

By: Eric Rizzo

Eric Rizzo — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:19:31 +0000

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.”