We are very pleased to report that the long awaited 2nd edition of the Eclipse RCP book (http://eclipsercp.org) is going to the presses on Thursday, April 15th. That means it should be in the stores by the end of the month. Of course, you don’t have to wait, you can pre-order from Amazon or read it online at Safari. Check out the book website for more info.

In addition to the snazzy new cover, this book is an update of the original content to include new technologies, updated workflows and more detail. Here is the marketing blurb from the back cover…

In Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Second Edition, three Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) project leaders show how to use Eclipse 3.5 (“Galileo”) to rapidly deliver cross-platform applications with rich, native-feel GUIs.

The authors fully reveal the power of Eclipse as a desktop application development platform; introduce important new improvements in Eclipse 3.5; and walk through developing a full-featured, branded RCP application for Windows, Linux, Mac, and other platforms—including handheld devices and kiosks.

Drawing on their extensive experience, the authors cover building, refining, and refactoring prototypes; customizing user interfaces; adding help and software management features; and building, branding, testing, and shipping finished software. They demonstrate current best practices for developing modular and dynamically extensible systems, using third-party code libraries, packaging applications for diverse environments, and much more.

For Java programmers at all levels of experience, this book

• Introduces important new RCP features such as p2, Commands, and Databinding
• Thoroughly covers key RCP-related technologies such as Equinox, SWT, JFace, and OSGi
• Shows how to effectively brand and customize RCP application look-and-feel
• Walks through user interface testing for RCP applications with SWTBot
• Illuminates key similarities and differences between RCP and conventional plug-in development

Hands-on, pragmatic, and comprehensive, this book offers all the real-world, nontrivial code example working developers need—as well as “deep dives” into key technical areas that are essential to your success.

Tags: book, eclipse, rcp, syndicate

This year’s Summer of Code application deadline has passed. I want to take the chance and introduce you to my planned project. I think the results will be a great benefit for the community. So, what does RAP/Equinox WAR products mean?

When searching the RAP newsgroup for “WAR deployment” 210 threads appear. The reason for this is that many developers have problems deploying a RAP application. These problems exist because RAP products build on top of Server-Side Equinox. Equinox has special requirements for the deployable archive. To making things easier for beginners and to simplify the deployment process a good approach and tooling is needed. The goal of this GSoC 2010 project is to provide this approach and tooling.

The planned approach is called WAR products. This should be a similar concept as the well known Eclipse product approach to make RCP developers feel at home. The tooling for the WAR products should also be very similar to the existing product tooling. I already talked to Chris Aniszczyk about this project and we both agree not to create a whole new tooling for the WAR products. I think it would be the best to make the existing tooling plugable to reuse most of the components for the WAR product tooling.

How does this fit in the RAP project? Well, I think RAP is probably the biggest consumer of the Server-Side Equinox technology. With this fact it’s in the interest of the RAP community to have a good concept and tooling for users. While doing this project as part of RAP we can easily get feedback from the community. Rüdiger Herrmann, co-lead of the RAP project, already agreed to mentor this GSoC project.

So, wouldn’t it be great to have such a tooling for WAR products? With this kind of tooling we can handle the deployment of Server-Side Equinox based applications the same way as normal RCP applications. The only problem at this point is the project needs to be accepted for GSoC 2010. So, my call to all accepted mentors: Please give the project a good vote. The full project’s proposal can be found at the Eclipse Wiki (Maybe you have some good ideas you want to share?). Thanks in advance for all votes.

Tags: equinox, rap, soc

I realize that Helios isn’t even out the door yet, but some people are already looking ahead to next years release.  The planning council has been taking suggestions for the name of the Eclipse 2011 release and has come up with a short list of names:

• Indigo
• Indra
• Indus
• Ion
• Ionia
• Iris
• Isaac
• Isis
• Ivory
• Izar

Now we need your help. We need you to help choose the name for the 2011 Eclipse Release Train.  Cast your vote at:

http://www.eclipse.org/helios/planning/poll2011name.php

Last summer when Galileo was released, I wrote a series of blogs in which I discussed my top 10 favorite features of the release.  Somebody at the Eclipse Foundation must have enjoyed the read because I won a free conference pass to EclipseCon 2010.  I thought it would only be fitting to share my top 10 moments from EclipseCon 2010 with all of you.  These are roughly in the order in which they happened (roughly).

1. p2 Tutorial

On Monday morning I had the pleasure of presenting a tutorial on p2. We had a few technical glitches with the USB sticks, but other than that, I thought the tutorial went well.  I was really lucky to have such a great co-presenter (Kim Moir).  The funny thing was, we only met a few hours early (in the bar, no less). I will post the slides and the examples for those of you interested.

2. Meeting everyone

One of the great things about EclipseCon is I finally get to meet everyone.  It’s great to finally put a face to all those people I only talk to on Twitter, bugzilla, mailing lists, conference calls, etc… Meeting people is also a great way to pay off your beer debt. I was really happy to meet the rest of the p2 team (Susan and Simon), our new top contributor Lars Vogel, PDE expert Benjamin Cabe, Build / Testing machine Dave Carver,  EclipseCon program chair Oisin Hurley, etc…

3. Jeff’s keynote

By far, the best keynote I have ever seen at any conference was given Wednesday morning by Jeff Norris.  I don’t know if live demos are rocket science, but very few people would try to control a 7 foot robot from a few hundred miles away — on a Mac.  Jeff talked a lot about how they (NASA) makes use of Eclipse technology.  He’s keynote made me proud to be part of such a great community producing excellent technology.

4. API Tutorial

Martin Oberhuber, Boris Bokowski and Michael Scharf put on a great tutorial about API design.  I attended the tutorial because 1) I am generally interested in API design, 2) I think API design is at the core of software modularization and I don’t think many people truly understand this.  I attended the tutorial to get ideas on how we can better teach API design at the University level.  As part of the tutorial, Martin issued a challenge — to design an API to track the number of people in the room.  This was a lot of fun, and a few of us gathered in the evening to discuss our solutions.  It was interesting that everyone came up with a completely different solution.  Martin gave some good feedback (some of which I disagree with), but that’s the point of API design — there is no right answer. If I ever teach some of this material, I think I’ll use a similar exercise.

5. Build, Build and more Build

Build was a hot topic at this years EclipseCon.  Whether it was Maven, PDE/Build, Hudson, Athena, b3 or buckminster, Build was everywhere.  One of the most interesting panels I attended was the battle of the build gurus, moderated by Dave Carver.  Dave designed a Jeopardy like game to keep the panel focused.

6. GIT Tutorial

One of my goals for the conference was to understand Git, and Thursday mornings Git tutorial helped a lot.  Chris, Shawn, Matthias and Robin did an excellent teaching Git and explaining that Git is not simply a replacement for CVS but rather a completely different was to think about revision control.  If you are interested in learning more about Git, checkout Linus Torvalds’ tech talk about Git.

7. Running

A big shout-out goes to Kim Moir for organizing the Eclipse Exercise Program.  While nothing wakes you up like a 7:00am run, the exercise program is as much about socializing as it is about exercising.  We averaged about 30 people a day.

8. Helping to solve 300500

There are a few bugs that are hard to tackle without face-to-face time, bug 300500 is one of them.

9. The program and new layout

I thought the program and conference layout was spot on.  I particularly enjoyed having a tutorial each morning, followed by talks that got progressively shorter as the day went on. Ending each day with a series of panels was also a great idea.

10. OSGi and Equinox Book

Well not really part of EclipseCon, Jeff McAffer did give me a copy of the new Equinox/OSGi book and on the flight home I had a chance to read through some of it.  If you are looking for information about Equinox/OSGi, this is the book for you.  The sections on services are excellent.

I’m already looking forward to next years EclipseCon.

Tags: eclipsecon