Missing Books considered harmful

A very large percentage of of my customers are just starting to use Eclipse and Eclipse based technologies for their applications. So apart from having the basic 4-6 days training in RCP, EMF, GMF, etc they all have have one common and very important question: "Which books should we buy?"

And that question has become increasingly difficult to answer lately.

There are a number of absolutely good and noteworthy Eclipse books, but almost all of these are not up-to-date and that can be a major problem for people that need a good reference guide and best practices guide to Eclipse.

Almost all of the books on Eclipse are one or two versions behind the current baseline and that means the readers will not be able to take advantage of the new and improved stuff. And consequently they are rather frustrated when the only source to the new functionality is... the source.

Yes, I do know that many of the books in question are under revision and expected to be here any time soon, but even these revisions are delayed - in some cases as long as a year. And yes, I do know that the authors of technical books do not get rich from their work, so they have little incentive to update their books.


But there must be something that can be done about this. Just consider the number of books that are marketed by Microsoft on their many technologies and consider which role these books play in many developers life.
Before you start: yes, most of Microsofts software is closed source and consequently you need the books... but why should you have to read though 8-12 millions lines of code to understand just what the new and much improved APIs do?

I would suggest that we add a new criteria before an incubator project can graduate: there must be a book or at least a number of authoritative articles on the project. And for each new major release, there must be an official update of these...

Whether the foundation should be part of this work or not, I don't know. I can easily see arguments for both...

Eclipse 3.4M2 Released

Eclipse 3.4M2 has been released. The Microsoft Windows edition is available for download from eclipse.org. Same goes for RCP SDK.

As usual you can also find information about the major change in New and Noteworthy.

As we develop as lot of stuff based on RCP and therefore use the PDE extensively, we really like the new plug-in spy. We hope the next releases will see more handy usability enhancements like this. The new editor template support - used for the new SWT expansions - are real time saves too. Making a new template is not all that easy though... maybe something can be done about that?

We look forward to see if M3 is going to bring just as many new exiting features...

And the great release wheel starts another turn

Another turn of the great release wheel has just ended successfully with the release of Eclipse 3.3 (Also known as Europa)... and the next turn starts immediately (to be named Ganymede)

The first mile stone, Eclipse 3.4M1, has just been released and it already has several new noteworthy items - see Eclipse 3.4 M1 - New and Noteworthy. My personal favorite is the "Extract Class refactoring", which will extract a number of member variables from an existing class into a new class. It forms a very good basis when an internal 1-to-1 relationship should be changed into a 1-to-n relationship.

If you want to know what is planned for Eclipse 3.4, you can look at the plan for Ganymede (alternatively here) and some of the sub-plans: Team, Text, JDT Core, JDT Text and JDT UI, and others... if you can find them yet. Note that these plans are not expected to become final before late August.

If you want to download Eclipse 3.4M1, use this link - with the new download structure of Eclipse 3.3 it can be a little difficult to find the download pages for specific releases.

Eclipse 3.3 released

Fresh from the eclipse-dev mailing-list:

The Eclipse team is pleased to announce that Eclipse 3.3 is now available for download, along with 21 Eclipse Projects, as part of the Europa coordinated release

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/


The New and Noteworthy is available here.

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.3-200706251500/whatsnew/eclipse-news.html


We would like to thank other committers, contributors and community members who contributed to the release, especially the following people

http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/acknowledgements_3_3.html

Changes in JFace for Eclipse 3.3 means work for us

Eclipse 3.3 is coming. And it adds a lot of new stuff everywhere. It isn't just Europa with its many new tools and technologies, but also the basic platform. Of those changes I have seen until now, the most important from an RCP point-of-view is in JFace:

org.eclipse.ui.menus extension point

This really will help cleaning up the extension point mess from Eclipse 3.2, although the use of commands, handlers and the corresponding declarations will take some getting used to. There are stil some things that cannot be fully declared so the ActionBarAdvisor has not completely disappeared.

org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ColumnLabelProvider basic label provider

This label provider together with org.eclipse.jface.viewers.TableViewerColumn enable column-specific label providers and editing support. It is going to be nice to be able to create complete repositories of label providers that can be used everywhere.

org.eclipse.jface.window.ToolTip tool tip support

Creating tool tips with an arbitrary content is also very nice in many RCP applications where a rich feed back can be a real time saver for the user.

org.eclipse.jface.viewers.OwnerDrawLabelProvider

This new cell label provider (in the same family as ColumnLabelProvider) allows you to draw a cell explicitly. Unfortunately it cannot be used to add complete SWT Controls in cells...

These changes to the training materials in order to be able to show all the new stuff. Just the above changes, takes 3-4 days of changes (including labs).

So I better get started...

Eclipse 3.3RC4 released

Eclipse 3.3 Release Candidate 4 (RC4) is now available for download from eclipse.org. This drop is being propagated to the various Eclipse mirror sites, which usually takes a day or so.

For people who have already downloaded the integration build with timestamp 200706081718, there's no need to download RC4 - it's the same.

Eclipse 3.3RC3 released

Eclipse 3.3 Release Candidate 3 (RC3) is now available for download from eclipse.org. This drop is being propagated to the various Eclipse mirror sites, which usually takes a day or so.

For people who have already downloaded the integration build with timestamp 200706011539, there's no need to download RC3 - it's the same.