EclipseCon NA 2014: Project Flux - Connecting the Eclipse IDE to the Cloud-Based Era of Developer Tooling

The Eclipse IDE is great, but also an old-fashioned and heavyweight desktop IDE application. As a contrast to this, new projects and companies are working towards cloud-based developer tooling, using a front-end that runs purely in the browser. The Eclipse Orion project is one example. While those new approaches look promising, they are usually completely disconnected from the existing desktop-class IDEs and are still lightyears away from working well for Java developers.

In this talk we present a new project that we've been working on that aims at bridging this gap between existing desktop-class IDEs and future cloud-based developer tooling. It is built around a new cloud-based architecture for developer tooling that integrates with todays desktop IDEs (like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or even Sublime Text). This new architecture takes existing IDEs explicitly into account, but allows developers to move towards cloud- and browser-based tooling at the same time. It provides, for example, real Java reconciling and compilation information, content-assist and navigation support in the browser, in real-time, without forcing developers to discard their desktop IDEs.

The talk explains the architecture behind this new project and shows several live demos using the latest prototypes and alpha versions that we implemented.

Transcript

1. Andy Clement & Martin Lippert Pivotal Project Flux Connecting the Eclipse IDE to the cloud-based Era of Developer Tooling © 2014 Pivotal
2. !2 "Why can Google search the internet in 100ms, but my Eclipse IDE takes 5 seconds to open a type hierarchy?
3. cloud-based developer tooling !3 the answer:
4. We are already close Google, issue tracker, CI build system, GitHub, Mail, Hangout, Help, Stackoverflow, etc. ! But coding? !4
5. !5
6. !6 NO
7. Challenge 1 We don’t know yet how cloud-based developer tooling should look !7
8. And the other tools? What about all the other tools that I love to use on my machine? !8
9. Challenge 2 jumping over into the cloud and leaving everything else behind doesn’t work today !9
10. Implementation Lets start from scratch and re- implement full blown language tooling in JavaScript !10
11. Implementation Lets start from scratch and re- implement full blown language tooling in JavaScript !11 NO
12. Challenge 3 re-use the good parts !12
13. connecting the desktop IDE to the cloud-based era of developer tooling Project Flux © 2014 Pivotal
14. Demo !14
15. Demo https:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkoplIMJfHw (in the screencast the project is called Flight, which was an early prototype name for it) !15
16. The backbone:
 Asynchronous Messaging
17. All sorts of micro services
18. Project Flux @ Eclipse
 Project Leads:
 John Arthorne (IBM)
 Martin Lippert (Pivotal)
 Creation review:
 March 26, 2014
 Wanna join? Let us know! !18
19. Thanks Disclaimer:
 It is NOT ready-to-ship code yet
 and the project is at the beginning ! ! Andy Clement, aclement@gopivotal.com
 Martin Lippert, mlippert@gopivotal.com !19