Reinhard Poetz wrote: <snip/>
Just want to mention that I don't think that our users need to know about OSGi at all if they don't want. They have to describe their block in the descriptor (block.xml) and the rest will be done automatically.
Maybe or maybe not ;) The OSGi manifest is mainly about exporting and importing Java packages, which are concerns that we haven't discussed in any detail for the block descriptor. We could put this info in the block.xml and generate the manifest file automatically from it.
In Eclipse they didn't go that way. There was some info in their pluggin descriptor that overlapped with the OSGi manifest. They depreciated this infor from the pluggin descriptor and recommend people to use the OSGi manifest instead. I would prefer that we do the same and consider the OSGi manifest and the block.xml as taking care of different concerns.
Concerning what the users will need to know, I would assume that most users today doesn't know that much about the current "compile time" block system as we haven't documented how it is used or given any promisses at all about the stability of the "contracts", i.e. gump snippets and ant related stuff. So today I would guess that rather few users develop own blocks. With the arrival of real blocks this will change and users who want to develop own blocks must of course learn something new. Much as one have to learn some new things to be able to develop an Eclipse plugin.
Of course we all have interest in making at easy as possible to develop new blocks and also to provide tool support for making it easy. I just want to emphasize that the real blocks not is so much about changing how things work today (something we should try to avoid), but mainly about *adding* new and more convenient ways to work.
/Daniel
