| <p>e4 is the incubator for the Eclipse project. Building on |
| current Eclipse and OSGi technology as a solid foundation, its major goals |
| include</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li>Making it easier to write plugins</li> |
| <li>Allowing better control over the look of Eclipse based products</li> |
| <li>Providing a uniform, pervasive platform across computing environments |
| (Web / RIA, Desktop, Server, Cloud, Embedded)</li> |
| <li>Increasing diversity of contributors to the platform</li> |
| <li>Maintaining backward compatibility for API-clean clients</li> |
| </ul> |
| <p>In order to reach these goals, Eclipse APIs are refactored into |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/e4/Eclipse_Application_Services">services</a> |
| that make up a uniform application model, which supports dependency |
| injection to run in multiple different contexts such as desktop or |
| web; the Workbench is uniformly |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/e4/Workbench_Model">modeled</a> |
| to provide introspection, flexible shaping, |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/DeclarativeUI/Styling_Roundup">CSS styling</a> |
| and |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/DeclarativeUI/Declarative_Construction_Roundup">declarative UI markup</a>; |
| SWT target platforms are added to |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/SWT_Browser_Edition">run in the Browser</a>; |
| and many more |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/e4">initiatives</a> in areas |
| such as <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Resources">flexible resources</a>, |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Commands">command recording</a>, |
| scripting, and plugins in |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/JavaScript">other languages</a>. |
| We also look at |
| <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Pervasive_Themes">pervasive themes</a> |
| such as reducing bloat, and many other themes are brought up by the |
| broad community participating in this effort. |
| </p> |
| <p> |
| The mission of the e4 project is to build a next generation platform for |
| pervasive, component-based applications and tools. See the |
| <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/e4/">original project proposal</a> |
| for more details. |
| </p> |