Dash, Tools for Committer Community

Introduction

The Tools for Committer Community (Dash) is a proposed open source project under the Technology Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology newsgroup. 

Description

The Eclipse project dashboard is a good first prototype of tools that will help the committer community. Project Dash is a place where the community itself can collaborate on tools for community awareness and collaboration in support of our ultimate objective of committer quality and cooperation.

This is very much a research project proposal as we are not entirely sure what these tools will be. Obviously extensions and enhancements of the dashboard are a possibility. Or perhaps there are add-ons to Bugzilla that could help with searching for duplicates? Perhaps there are mash-ups of our wiki and the ECF project that could help with committer awareness and collaboration? We will prototype these tools in this project and if they stick, we'll roll them into production on the eclipse.org or dev.eclipse.org website.

Our first tool is going to be Eclipse Monkey - a dynamic scripting tool for the automation of routine programming tasks. Monkey scripts are little Javascript programs using either the Eclipse APIs or custom Monkey DOMs. The prototype help pages (page 1 and page 2) explaining this further.

Tentative Roadmap

• M0 (Dec 18, 2005) Project approval and initial code drop of Eclipse Monkey

• M1 (Feb 6, 2006) Second DOM; dependency meta-data; update site compatible DOMs

• M2 (Mar 20, 2006) script gallery website

• EclipseCon (Mar 22) DOMFest at EclipseCon (BOF for building scripts and DOMs)

• M3 (May 1, 2006) resource change triggered scripts; meta-data parsing extension

• M4 (Jun 12, 2006) script self testing; scripting 3.2 Command sequences

• R1.0 (Jun 30, 2006) release coincident with Callisto

Organization

We propose this project should be undertaken as a sub-project within the Eclipse Technology Project. 

Proposed project lead and initial committers

• Bjorn Freeman-Benson (Eclipse Foundation)
• Ward Cunningham (Eclipse Foundation)
• Ed Warnicke (Cisco)

Code Contributions

Initial code contributions (the Eclipse Monkey scripting system) from Ward Cunningham and Bjorn Freeman-Benson.