Making Slides Public

I have begun to make most of my slides public via slideshare.com.

Until now, it have just been the more relevant slides from presentations, I have held at various occasions such as EclipseCon and Eclipse Summit Europe as well as presentations from eclipse.dk and the Eclipse Banking Day in Copenhagen. You can also find some of my MDD lectures at the IT University in Copenhagen here.

I will soon also make the first part of my slides for Eclipse RCP training available via slideshare.com. It takes a little work, so stay tuned. I will try to maintain a complete list of public slides on our web.

Please note that for all the usual reasons, some of the slides and videos are in Danish :-)

Learning more about Eclipse plug-in development...

As part of the Eclipse Foundation Training series, there are scheduled 5 classes on "Advanced Eclipse RCP".

This is the perfect class for people, who have developed Eclipse plug-ins for the last year or so and now wants to know more about some of the more advanced subjects in Eclipse plug-in development.

The title of the classes is "Advanced RCP Eclipse", but with the exception of one subject, all the subjects of the class are just as relevant if you're developing Eclipse plug-ins for the IDE.


Amoung the subjects we will teach in the classes are:

• Wizards - which is basically here because we don't have time for this subject during "Development in Eclipse RCP".
  
• Long-Running operations and Jobs and how to make the interaction between these and the UI as painless as possible.
  
• How to use Eclipse Adapters. While the Adapter framework arguably is one of the more difficult to understand and use properly, the is also a framework that will solve many of the problems you might face is larger non-trivial applications especially when used in conjunction with the menus extension point and handlers.
• The Data Binding framework and how to use this to cut down on the boilerplate code in the application.
• How to handle virtual trees and tables when either the amount of data is large or the retrieval time is long for items in the tree or table.
• How to declare and implement your own extension points. Not that this is especially difficult, but there are a number of god design patterns around this that can help reduce the code involved and also make your application react properly when plug-ins are either added or removed from the running aplication.
• How to do head less builds using PDEBuild, which probably is not of the most troublesome subjects in Eclipse. One day it works, then next it don't...
  

You can see the complete list of subjects in these classes and where to attend of the classes on the training page.

Although the page on the training says "Prerequisites: Solid Java experience, experience with Eclipse SDK as a Java development environment and notions of Eclipse RCP", I know from past experience that mere notions will make for very hard three days. In the classes we assume you know about commands, views, perspectives, etc - basically the subjects from the "Development in Eclipse RCP".

If you have been developing Eclipse plug-ins for some time, this just might be the next class for you...

Ask the experts

We have just finished our Advanced Eclipse RCP training in Copenhagen. All-in-all a success with one "minor" problem: we had far too much materials for a three day course. It could easily have been a four day course.

One very good thing we did in this course was to get Thomas Hallgren to present Buckminster. Thomas, being one of he main developers of Buckminster, could answer all the many questions there was on building plug-ins and products in Eclipse. This is definitely something, we would consider doing again another time. I think almost everybody present wanted to go home a play a little more with Buchminster.

Shaping up for the Autumn :-)

Autumn is comming and with that many of us will be busy with training, mentoring and whatever we do for a living.

In order to get in shape for the Autumn, we participated in the largest fun run the DHL Relay in Copenhagen. 21000 teams with 5 runners each running 5 km in the middle of Copenhagen! The relay takes place over 5 days and just about every company in the Copenhagen area participates. Some with just one team and some with several hundred teams.

Most of the teams, ours included, combine the running with a good dinner afterwards.

The next runs are in 2 weeks (10 km) and in four weeks (13 km)...

And then we hope to be in shape for whatever the Autumns brings...

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 RCP Training in Copenhagen and Stockholm

As already announced on Eclipse.org, we will now start another round on Eclipse RCP Training all over the world.

I'm happy to say that The RCP Company will also participate this time with training in Copenhagen (May 19-22) and in Stockholm (June 2-5).

The training includes all the essential knowledge to properly develop an Eclipse RCP based application based on Eclipse 3.3 (Europa). The subjects include:

• Introduction to RCP
• RCP Application lifecycle
• Internal structure
• Workbench
• Publishing
• Plug-ins
• Contributing to Workbench
• Introduction to SWT
• Introduction to JFace
• Views
• Commands and Actions
• Editors
• Wizards
• Help
• New and Noteworthy Features of Ganymede (also known as Eclipse 3.4)
  

You can register online - via the links above - or directly with The RCP Company. The training is offered for the special event promotional price of €1200. There is a 10% discount if you register before March 31, and an additional 5% discount if you register 3 or more employees from your company.

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...