Web Tools for Mobile

The Web Tools for Mobile project is a proposed open source project under the Sequoyah Container Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Sequoyah Eclipse Forum.

Background

Historically, mobile tools providers have been customizing desktop web tools in a proprietary way to create their tools.

This project aims to seed the Eclipse community with a complete web tools solution, including editing, building, deploying and debugging. It also includes a reference target - Web Runtime - with complete preview and debug capabilities.

Scope

Web Tools for Mobile (WTM) will be a basis for web development tooling for mobile devices. It will leverage other projects, such as JSDT, for generic development. Since WTM is focusing one of the types of the mobile developer tooling, it will be a sub-project of Sequoyah. For Web applications, WTM will add functionality for mobile specific features like previewing, skinning, configuration, device deployment, and debugging.

This project will:

Identify common requirements for Web Tools for Mobile
Provide set of extensible frameworks that will enable creation of the IDEs for specific mobile runtimes.
Will provide a unified architecture that will improve compatibility between offerings from different vendors.
Leverage existing Eclipse project and frameworks.

Description

Mobile web runtimes are based around existing and widely adopted standards like HTML, AJAX and JavaScript. Almost every mobile platform has proprietary APIs, packaging requirements and hardware capabilities. The goal of WTM is to enable creation of tools that would leverage individual advantages of mobile platforms and lower learning curve for application developers.

WTM provide features to enable the creation, editing, previewing, debugging and testing of WTM applications. The tools leverage edit and build capabilities from JSDT, debugging capabilities from Chromium, and preview capabilities from XULRunner.

More information about the development and structure can be found here

More information about using the tools can be found here

Initial Contribution

org.symbian.tools.wrttools contains sources for project builder, project nature, markers, and project wizards
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.debug.core contains sources for WRT Debugger component
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.doc.WebDeveloper contains Web Developer's Library Documentation
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.doc.WRTKit contains WRTKit documentation
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.previewer contains sources for the WRT Previewer
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.product contains WRT IDE product plug-in
org.symbian.tools.wrttools.feature contains feature plug-in
org.chromium.debug.core contains sources for Chromium debugger core package
org.chromium.debug.ui contains sources for Chromium debugger UI package
org.chromium.sdk contains sources for Chromium SDK
org.w3c.css contains CSS Validator plug-in

Legal Issues

Most of the contributed code is licensed with EPL.

There are three components with different licenses:

Library	Vendor	License
CSS Validator	W3C Consortium	W3C
Google Chrome Developer Tools	The Chromium Authors	New BSD
XULRunner	Mozilla Foundation	Mozilla tri-license

Committers

The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:

Eugene Ostroukhov, Symbian Foundation

Mentors

The following Architecture Council members will mentor this project:

Eric Cloninger
TBD

Interested Parties

The following individuals, organisations, companies and projects have expressed interest in this project:

Dan Podwall, Nokia
Ken Wallis, RIM
Jon Dearden, RIM
Nitin Dahyabhai, IBM

Project Scheduling

Initial contribution will be made at project approval

Changes to this Document

Date	Change
02-April-2010	Document created
14-April-2010	Update to address Wayne Beaton's feedback