Dependency Injection in e4 Revised

EclipseCon is the perfect occasion when you want to discuss the way things are done in the various projects of Eclipse. Not only will almost everybody that matters in the projects be present at the conference, but there are usually also plenty of opportunities to get the right people together to discuss stuff.

In this case, I asked for a BoF on the use of Dependency Injection in e4 based on a previous blog entry on the subject titled "Dependency Injection in e4 - just why do we want to do that?". 9 people showed up and we had a pretty good discussion on the use of DI in e4 and how the usability could be improved.

The results can be found in a number of bug reports:

• Bug 300099 - How developers are expected to discover injected values?
In comment 7 Paul Webster sums up the discussions quite nicely.
• Bug 307061 - Use annotations for invoke
• Bug 302824 - Add support to get easy access to workbench services without DI

All in all, I have to say, I fell a lot better about dependency injection now than before the BoF. With these changes, we will suddenly have most of the usual tooling in e4 as we know it in 3.x....