Thanks to everybody who attended or presented at the Portland Eclipse DemoCamp last Monday. This time the theme was “Eclipse for mobile developers”. We had about 50 attending, which is a strong uptick from past events.
Below some pictures and slides from the event:
1. Michael Galpin (@michaelg) from eBay opened the night with a presentation on ‘Android Development with Eclipse’. He introduced the Android platform and demoed the Eclipse-based Android Development Tools (ADT). Interesting fact: eBay’s mobile applications on Android are enjoyed by more than 3 million users. If you want to learn more about Android, Michael’s upcoming Android book should be a good place to start.
2. John Thomas from RIM continued with ‘BlackBerry Application Development Options‘. BlackBerry developers have a variety of language choices for developing apps, such as Java, HTML5/Javascript and Adobe AIR. All development tools are integrated nicely in Eclipse and Adobe’s FlashBuilder (also Eclipse based). Visit this page for details on BlackBerry app development.
3. Elias Volanakis (@evolanakis) talked about ‘iPad Development with Eclipse RAP‘. After introducing the project I demoed how to write a calculator web-app for the iPad using Java. We are optimizing RAP for mobile devices for the 1.4 release next summer. You can download the slides here.
If you want to learn more about Android / Blackberry / iPad development while enjoying some free pizza and beer, I would be glad to see you next Monday. Will have three presentations:
Android Development with Eclipse
BlackBerry Application Development Options
iPad development with Eclipse
The event is scheduled for this Monday, Nov 8th at 6pm at the Lucky Labrador Beer Hall, 1945 NW Quimby (map).
Yesterday Apple announced the App Store for the Mac OS X Lion operating system, which will be released mid-2011. You probably know the App Store from the iPhone, iPod or the iPad. It’s a really cool way to install Apps. From a developer point of view it’s also interesting because a huge amount of the marketing for an App is done by the App Store for you.
For me as an Eclipse developer the first thing that came to my mind while watching yesterday’s Apple keynote was, “It would be so cool if I could install Eclipse or RCP-based Apps directly on my Mac with the App Store.” We know that in the past Apple hasn’t been very open to Java-based applications. But, since then, they have given up their strange licensing policy and allow Apps to be written in other technologies.
As a result of this, it should be possible to ship Java-based applications with the App Store. Of course, this is just my opinion and we have to make sure that Apple will allow it. But, if it’s allowed, this should be the last big hurdle before we can investigate the App Store for Eclipse and RCP-based Apps. Imagine: installing, auto updating, user reviews, marketing and ratings all under one hood. If we do this right, it could create a synergistic relationship between the App Store and the Eclipse Marketplace. For example, promote once and your application could show up on the Marketplace and the App Store.
So, it can’t be too early to start looking at the possibilities. I opened an Eclipse Bug to support the Mac App Store. Maybe you’re interested in this topic and want to help make it real. The bug id is 328317.
If you ever wondered if RAP runs on the iPad, the answer is now YES. We fixed a number of iPad-related bugs for 1.4M2, and now it runs (almost) trouble-free. You can even start your RAP-application in fullscreen, making it look more like a native app. See for yourself with this video:
Over the last couple of days, Jordi and I played a little with the Eclipse RAP protocol. We decided to develop a Cocoa Touch client for RAP using the iAd JavaScript library. You can see how it looks in this YouTube video.
Here’s a brief explanation of what’s in the video. We developed a new bundle which contains the iAd JavaScript library. Basically, iAd brings Cocoa Touch widgets into the browser, and we’ve written handlers that create widgets based on this JavaScript library. We could then start a simple RAP application with the iAd bundle and access it with Safari.
The result is just awesome. You can write your UI completely with SWT on the server side and access it with the iPad/iPhone/iPod or with just a webkit based browser. The UI experience feels just like native Cocoa Touch. Eclipse RAP and the RAP protocol makes it possible . Please note that this is just a prototype and not yet available for download. But you can check out the RAP protocol using git and develop your own client representation.
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. Please note that this is just a prototype and not yet available for download. But you can check out the 
