Hi all, after over 2 years of maintaining PDT related plugins, i've come to the following conclusions:
1. A lot of people have a hard time setting up an eclipse instance to suite their needs for PHP development - with the multitude of all the existing plugins available. 2. More and more people move over to PHPStorm The migration to PHPStorm imho has 2 main reasons: 1. Out-Of-The-Box experience: simply download the thing and start working 2. Better performance I think both issues can be addressed by providing a plain Eclipse distribution targeting especially the needs of PHP / Web developers. By releasing a custom distribution, we can for example provide a tweaked eclipse.ini with optimized JVM settings. Also, a custom distribution could pre-configure other features to improve the performance / user experience, for example by disabling useless validators etc. I've therefore started working on a tycho-built eclipse distro based on the following features (so far): - DLTK 5.0 - PDT 3.2 - PDT Extensions Core <https://github.com/pdt-eg/Core-Plugin> - Composer Plugin <https://github.com/pulse00/Composer-Eclipse-Plugin> - PHP Tool Integration <https://github.com/PHPsrc/PHP-Tool-Integration> - MakeGood <https://github.com/piece/makegood> - Json Editor <https://github.com/pulse00/Json-Eclipse-Plugin> - Yaml Editor <https://github.com/oyse/yedit> Another reason why a custom distribution would be an advantage is that we don't have to rely on patches being applied to the Eclipse runtime, like this one here, which would be a rather great improvement for anyone working with webapplications: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=351303 Here's what the distro could provide on an Eclipse-Runtime Level: - Register an *eclipse://* URL protocol, so Stack-Trace links in the browser could be opened directly in eclipse (like Sublimetext or Textmate work on osx) - Provide a Listener-Extension for the *SWT.OpenDocument* event, so plugins can import existing projects by drag & drop onto Eclipse The product i'm working on will be fully open-source and free of charge, however i'm also thinking of ways to fund the development of new features to PDT Core / PDT-Extensions or any other related plugin. My main ideas are: - Go down the crowd-funding route, for example like py-dev has been doing: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pydev-and-liclipse-for-a-fast-sexy-and-dark-eclipse - Find sponsors for new features, similar to what travis-ci does: https://travis-ci.org/ Any feedback greatly appreciated. regards -robert
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