Eclipse at VMware Laura Bellamy November 2009

Reasons for Moving to Eclipse Supports a plug-in environment that works for our product model  Product components are delivered as plug-ins  Third-party content integrates as plug-ins  Refresh content at the component level Many engineering teams already use the Eclipse IDE to develop products Existing Eclipse support in the DITA OT  Eclipse build targets  Navref, anchoref, searchtitle, and navtitle Existing Framework vs. raw HTML  The Information Center Framework has good functionality

Reasons for Moving to Eclipse (cont.) Open source solution API makes it easy to extend Framework is highly customizable (icons, chrome, default behavior) Lucene search with option to add engines Integrated localized content Static URLs allow customers to bookmark specific topics across releases

Cons of Eclipse Open source docs are out of date and have content gaps Hard to find Eclipse documentation and guidance outside of IBM Eclipse is huge. Tough to determine what you need Standalone requires Eclipse/Java A lot of customization is Javascript

Eclipse Gotchas Agree on terminology with development teams  Eclipse might be familiar to engineers, but they speak a different language than you do.  Example: "plug-in" and "framework". Understand the difference between information centers and standalone help Consider the IT resources required Componentized architecture can have big DITA impact Discuss business process and role changes for IC ownership