John O’Shea comments on the efforts taken by the Eclipse Foundation in co-coordinating its various top-level projects. “What is the relative importance of producing exemplary tools versus extensible frameworks? The difficulty, it seems, is in striking a balance in developing both,” O’Shea says.

He goes on to explain how JDT evolved as the exemplary tool for the Eclipse platform, a best of breed tool and a domain specific framework for reuse by other Java-centric projects. However, “the JDT exemplary tools alone are not enough to facilitate the requirements of downstream ‘consumer’ projects.”

“The danger is faced by the downstream projects, adapters (those who consume extension points and exemplary tools and develop on them) and users (those interested in taking the output of one or more Eclipse projects and consuming them as-is). As they consume more top level Eclipse.org projects into a single product, they might find themselves inheriting frameworks and/or tools that either do not integrate at all or worse, duplicate core functionality. In this case, all the exemplary tooling in the world won’t compensate for the inability to get disparate frameworks from different projects to play well together,” O’Shea says.

He concludes, saying that a neutral Eclipse.org mediation facility may be the only way to ensure that top-level projects produce frameworks that meet the high standard set by the original Platform/JDT contributions and integrate in a consistent fashion into a larger Eclipse “Platform”.