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.

Don't forget your running shoes... if you feel blue

For those of you that feel a little run in the morning is a good cure for any blues - or simply fear that all the hard late work will warrant it - there will be a short 5-6 km tun in the morning starting from the entrance of Hotel Nestor.

Just be there by 7:20 and we will take a slow scroll around the parks of the center of Ludwigsburg. Any ideas for good routes will be much appreciated.

See you Tuesday morning!

ESE '08: Please provide a proper calendar

In the Spring at EclipseCon '08, there was a iCal based calendar with all the events and sessions of the conference. That was very useful when you wanted to figure out just what to attend to. The fact that it was in iCal format made it possible to synchronize to many types of devices - such as mobile phones - as well as Google Calendar...

But for ESE '08, I cannot find a calendar with the sessions. Just the one made by Bjørn - it seems - with three entries: "Symposia", "Day 1" and "Day 2". It is linked to from the front page of ESE '08, so one can only assume that it was the intension to add more stuff... or not?

If a calendar with all the events and sessions exists, can anybody point me to it?

ESE '08: Will there be any organized runs this year?

I have been looking for some time now, but as I cannot find anything, I have to ask: Will there be any organized runs this year at Eclipse Summit Europe?

With all the good food and the many sessions where we all sit and listen, a little run or two would do us all good.

Meet Wayne Beaton in Denmark

Wayne - our most esteemed evangelist - will talk at a after-work meeting for eclipse.dk in Copenhagen on Thursday. The subject - apart from whatever you ask him - will be test driven development:

Test first development is a top-down process by which code is written starting with tests. Once tests have been created, the process changes to that of making the tests work by implementing the application code. In this short talk, we demonstrate how Eclipse support for JUnit facilitates test first development in the context of creating Java and Java EE applications, and plug-ins.

If you would like to participate, the meeting is taking place at ITU (Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 5.sal, 2300 København S) Thursday 16:00-18:30. Please sign up at eclipse.dk.

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...

Annotating Eclipse Resources

In continuation of my last post, a small suggestion.



The Eclipse web site contains a rather large number of articles and resources, but it is rather difficult to see which version of Eclipse they pertain to. E.g. consider the article "Creating JFace Wizards". This is article is from 2002 and many readers will - at least initially - disregard it as being too old and likely not up-to-date. That is not the case, but how can you know that?

My sugestion is to add extra information to the article outline that lists the Eclipse versions for which this article is still relevant and if possible describe the level of "outdatedness" if case an article is not completely up-to-date.



In order to keep the extra information up-to-date, first the original author and then a volunteer will be asked to re-read the article and state the relevance for the new Eclipse release and possibly state the work needed to update the article. This way, we might also get a larger number of up-to-date sources on many of the more relevant Eclipse technologies which in turn will help out with the problems I outlines in my previous post.

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...