equinox
eclipse runtime exploration

 
Mission Statement
The goal of the Equinox project is to experiment with techniques for broadening the range of Eclipse platform runtime configurations. For example, the Eclipse plugin model is static; there is no discussion of practices and tools for managing/reducing interplugin dependencies; service discovery is not covered and the component distribution mechanism is non-standard.

These issues do not severely impact the usefulness of Eclipse as a development tool platform but they do affect the use of Eclipse in more constrained environments (e.g., handheld devices, IT managed environments, mass-appeal applications etc.). The Equinox project will investigate such issues and develop approaches which are practical and applicable to the main Eclipse code base. more info...

The orientation of the Equinox project is changing somewhat with the emergence of the Eclipse 3.0 work. When Equinox was founded, Eclipse 3.0 was a faint thought for sometime in the future. As 3.0 solidified it became apparent that Equinox could have a much more timely impact. Accordingly, you will find the work here to be more closely tied to the Eclipse work in general and the 3.0 Rich Client Platform runtime work in particular.

What's New
Sep 30th - Equinox runtime available
Work Areas
Dynamic Plug-ins
Issues around changing plug-in configurations without restarting the runtime. This is further broken down into classloader management, dynamic registry and registry lifecycle events.
Alternate Runtimes
Separating the Java component runtime model (e.g., classloaders etc) from notions of plug-in dependency, extensions and extension-points, etc. This work area breaks down into separation of the models and the mapping of plug-in essentials to existing Java component runtimes (e.g., OSGi, Avalon, JMX, ...).
Services
Adding a services model to Eclipse.
Tools and Techniques
Tools and techniques for developing plug-ins which take advantage of the new function proposed in Equinox and behave well in dynamic situations.
Security, roles, profiles
Study how enable a security model.
Developer Resources
Documents
Equinox design documents.
Downloads
Download parts of the Equinox experiment.
Plans
See what is happening in Equinox.
FAQ
What are people asking about Equinox.
Newsgroup
Talk to the people using Equinox.
Mailing list
Talk to the people working on Equinox.
Bugs/Issues
Discover the current bugs and issues in Equinox.

CVS
The Equinox code repository is available via web access or direct CVS access. For direct access, use anonymous login to the CVS repo

:pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org/home/technology

The Equinox work goes on in the org.eclipse.equinox directory/module. Note that most work is done in various branches rather than HEAD.

Committers
The people working on Equinox.