I highly recommend that people take a look at the ‘Eclipse on Rails and Rockets‘ EclipseCon 2009 talk. It’s exciting to see what consumers of Eclipse technology have been doing. In the first part of the talk, we learn that the Swiss Federal Railway has been using RCP to monitor trains…

In the talk, I was amazed to learn that a lot of this process used to be done by hand before:

Thankfully, they decided to use Eclipse RCP with cool visualizations and a lot of workbench windows:

For the second half of the talk, we got a peak at what NASA has been doing for the past 5 years with Eclipse RCP. In particular, the work with the Mars Exploration missions was mesmerizing to watch (zoom in on that surface!):

The NASA folks also discussed how they are using Eclipse in other missions now:

In the end, the NASA folks presented a slide which tickled my interest:

From what I understand, it looks like NASA has grasped the benefit of building platforms. Platforms are all about components. Once you start building components (via Eclipse/OSGi), it’s easy to see how a platform can materialize. I would be curious to see if NASA has a “platform team” internally now that is responsible for their Eclipse-based technology to be consumed by other NASA departments.

So what are you waiting for… sit back for about 40 minutes and enjoy a great talk!

Tags: eclipse, nasa

Boris Bokowski and I are in charge of the UI and RCP track at EclipseCon 2009. It took forever to weed through all the submissions, but we eventually made some choices and I think we put together an excellent program. We have three tutorials:

Building Commercial-Quality Eclipse Plugins
RCP Mail 2.0: Commands, Common Navigator, and Data Binding
Advanced Eclipse Rich Client Platform

These tutorials should provide great coverage for beginners and even experts. For beginners, I’d highly recommend Dan Rubel and Eric Clayberg’s tutorial on building commercial quality plug-ins. These are the same guys behind the book that shares the same name as the tutorial. For experts, the other two tutorials are good options, however, I’m personally excited about the RCP Mail 2.0 tutorial as I want the outcome of that tutorial to result in a new PDE template that can be used by all. At least, that’s my hidden agenda in vouching for that tutorial

For long talks, we have plenty but here are three of my favorites:

Eclipse on Rails and Rockets
Sleeping Around: Writing tools that work in Eclipse, Visual Studio, Ruby, and the Web
Max and John’s Excellent Plug-in Adventure: The Highlight Reel

The main stage talk should be really interesting as you get to hear from two adopters of Eclipse… and how they used Eclipse technology within NASA and the Swiss Railway system. Then you have a talk by some old Eclipse committers that decided to stress themselves out by writing tools that run anywhere… from Eclipse to Visual Studio. Finally, there will be an entertaining talk from Max and John about Eclipse plug-in development anti-patterns.

We also have a lot of short talks but here are three I’m personally looking forward too:

Carbon Dating: The treacherous path from Carbon to Cocoa for SWT
Nuclear Eclipse : Eclipse in nuclear power plants
Real World RCP

It’s always entertaining to hear Steve Northover talk, he’s like a wise guitar-playing sage. Joining Steve will be Scott Kovatch from Adobe, they will talk about the challenges in getting the SWT Cocoa port ready for Galileo. I’m impressed with the work so far as I’ve been using the SWT Cocoa port since Eclipse 3.5M4 and it’s been pretty stable. It will definitely be ready for the prime time when Galileo ships. The other two short talks I like are more case study related… and always fun to listen to. I mean, Eclipse in nuclear power plants… that’s awesome!

So there you have it. All I can say is that I hope you enjoy the program this year! See you in March!

Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, nasa, rcp