1. Its really exciting to witness how eclipse maturing every year and providing wider setof tools.Eclipse API helped Imaginea build diverse set of tools for heterogeneous domainsfrom Database, BPM , Rule Engine, Mashup to Service Component Architecture.Now here is e4 to satisfy the growing demand from the clients for web-enabledeclipse platforms in the domains of mashup and soa.e4 in a nutshell not only relieves us from IDE-ness and typical desktop-centricexperiences; but at the same time simplifies UI-development (xml model basedwidget declaration), supports all types of dynamic languages and RIA (no longer justa Java-rich-client) and finally dynamic deployment on clouds !e4s mantra is - produce, bind and consume Eclipse Application Services . In fact,this is how any present-day-application is perceived in a world, turning fast into aService-only Delivery-channel !EMF was already REST-compliant and Equinox the perfect OSGi guy !So what remains is re-organizing eclipse sdk frameworks into well defined RESTfulinterfaces to make eclipse a set of On-demand offerings !I hope it will unveil the eclipse super-force and be the strongest weapon in developersarmory. e4 will provide much-needed uplift for Eclipse as a common platform for aset of diverse frameworks.Now lets quickly glance through the compelling features :(1) XWT (XML Windows Toolkit) - quickfire design and customization withconsistent rendering across platforms and browsers.So you define your ui-controls (SWT/FLEX/AIR etc.) in ecore model !e4 will take care of the rest i.e. - Builders will build the controls, bind widgets tolayouts and finally javascript-event handlers will be generated to manipulate EMFmodels (the same way html dom is manipulated in web browser)Well sounds similar to GWT ! But its more comforting to hear that we handle EMFmodel at the end of the day not html DOM.XWT will ensure Eclipse is no longer a desktop blackbox rather a web-platform toweave heterogeneous widgets (swt/awt) and styles through dynamic languages on-the-fly!(2) CSS support and seamless integration of java-script i.e. support/integrateapplications written in java-scripts by compiling them using e4 API dynamically.e4 provides a Javascript Framework - a standalone bundle in OSGi instance.JavaScript bundles communicates thru JSON manifest files !

2. (3) PAAS (Platform As Application Service) - what makes e4 so special is its service-oriented programming model based on OSGi. Now plug-ins can be reused outside aspecific enviromnet (a limitation in current desktop editions).No more tight-coupling with Platform, WorkBench, IDE, ResourcesPlugin andJavaCore API.In current eclipse architecture, only OSGi Sevice API and Extension Registry API use- Sevice Programming Model - with service locator pattern.Now in e4 incarnation, what sounds most promising is the SOA implementation forall types of eclipse frameworks with the full-fledged support for DependencyInjection- that means - if I am a client of Widget-service, I dont need to be aware of theservice producer and service broker. Just simply specify annotations (injection points)widget-services can be accessed and consumed !So instead of loading the IDE jars, one can simply depend on widget api in clientcode. Simply put, an eclipse project explorer / language editor can be integrated as astand-alone entity with a swing/gwt/java script (one of several possibilities) clientwithout depending on the whole eclipse codebase.Here is a nice blog to get your hand dirty :http://www.vogella.de/blog/2009/08/12/eclipse-e4e4 is going to be the single most important thing in an eclipse developers life.Well ! Lets all try out e4 today to unleash the power of eclipse !http://live.eclipse.org/node/724http://www.eclipse.org/e4/resources/e4-whitepaper-20090729.pdfhttp://wiki.eclipse.org/E4http://live.eclipse.org/node/791