Open ecosystems like Eclipse play a major role in providing developers with an independent and open environment to build software. Although the Eclipse IDE is a great and flexible solution for software development, one thing bothers us (and others): The current version of Eclipse uses operating-system-dependent, outdated browser technologies. This issue was already brought up and discussed by the Eclipse community. But the efforts done so far were not successful.
After analyzing the problem and much experimentation, we found three possible solutions:
- Using (updated) platform dependent browsers
- Using Chromium
- With Chromium Embedded Framework (tight integration)
- By embedding Electron (hard decoupling)
All approaches have benefits and drawbacks, and after many discussions with the Eclipse community, we decided to go down the Electron path (see https://github.com/YattaSolutions/org.eclipse.swt.browser.electron).
We will present the current state of the project and how our approach could be integrated in your solution.
As there is much work yet to be done, we will demonstrate how you can contribute to the project and where the biggest challenges are still to be solved. Then, we will discuss the next steps and how the project can finally become a real Eclipse / SWT project.
Many aspects of this talk were already presented to and discussed with several stakeholders and committees in the Eclipse community—such as the Planning Council and IDE Working Group. This talk sums up our conclusions—and this will be the first time they are presented as such.
The talk will feature demos of the different approaches and some coding examples showing how this could be integrated into other projects.
