[xwiki-devs] [Brainstorming] Improving Developer Onboarding

Hi devs, I’ve spent 3 days at Devoxx FR 2015 and I’ve seen interesting things. I have some ideas on how we could improve Developer Onboarding for XWiki. Idea 1: Eclipse Oomph ===================== This tool will allow us to ease developed onboarding a lot by providing our "flavor" of Eclipse with preinstalled list of plugins, bound Git repos, automatically checking out projects, setting our XWiki code styles and more. See https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Installer It's going to be available in Eclipse Mars. See also this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QlSosecEUo&list=UUej18QqbZDxuYxyERPgs2… Idea 2: Codenvy =============== Codenvy is an online IDE that runs in your browser and it provides not only an editor but also auto completion, syntax highlighting, debugging and a lot more. Especially it provides the ability to select project types to generate projet skeletons and ability to deploy your code. See https://codenvy.com/ Thus we can imagine writing several extensions for it that would allow any contributor to very quickly get an environment to develop an XWiki extension: * We could provide 1 or 2 project templates, one for a simple XAR module for example and one for developing some XWiki components * We could also provide a deployment target (and even a docker VM) so that once the contributor has made code changes, he can deploy them into a running XWiki directly from his browser in Codenvy and test his code. I feel that it’s perfectly well adapted to the occasional contributor use case. No environment to setup. Just a few clicks and you’re ready to patch XWiki or one of its extensions, test it and submit a pull request (note that the PR can be submitted directly from within the IDE without anything to set up on your machine! I’ve seen a demo of this in a session at Devoxx). WDYT? Thanks -Vincent