I just cast my vote in the JDJ Readers’ Choice Awards. I think of this as superior to the Peoples’ Choice Awards as there is little chance of running into Paris Hilton at the award ceremony. This is for two very good reasons: (1) Paris Hilton isn’t interested in this sort of thing, and (2) there is no award ceremony. But I digress…

Anyway, if you love Eclipse, be sure to cast your vote. We’re in a few categories including the perennial IDE categories and the RCP category. There’s also a few books in there that you might want to praise with a kudo or two (I guess it’ll have to be one kudo, you only get one vote). I gave some ups to a great book written by some friends of mine.

I sorted it out. Last month, I wrote about some work that I was doing with the EBay SDK and Eclipse RCP. I had a few problems getting the integration to work, but I’ve sorted them out. I demoed it to Ian today and even he thought it looks pretty cool.

So far, the demo isn’t all that interesting. It gets the user to login by providing a user name and password, and then opens up the workbench with a single view that shows a tree of categories. Categories can be nested arbitrarily deep, so you can click on the little ‘+’ sign to expose the child categories. Of course, it would be too painful to load in the entire category tree, so it does it on demand using the deferred population like the CVS browser (i.e. it shows “Pending…” while it loads the subtree).

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is some weirdness: there is no way to log a user on by userid and password. To log on a user, you have to direct a browser to a specific page on the EBay site which will take care of gathering the user’s information. Once the user has logged onto the EBay site, the RCP application can take over. At first, I thought that making this work would be hard. It’s actually pretty easy.

Before the workbench is opened by the application, my application creates a separate shell with a org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser that points to the initial login page. An org.eclipse.swt.browser.LocationListener is added to the browser; after the user logs on successfully, they are directed to a “success” page. The listener detects this and closes the shell. It then opens the workbench.

I need to add a little flourish to the site (i.e. now that I’ve got it working, I need to make it look prettier) and add some branding in the form of a splash screen, but it’s mostly there. I’m going to set it up to browse auctions first. Once I start to get a little more familiar with the EBay API, I’m going to set it up to watch for auctions that fit some kind of pattern. At least that’s my plan. I’m sure it will evolve.

At some point in the future, I’m going to have to look into moving the application from the relatively safety of the sandbox to the real world. Technically, I think this is pretty easy. There are some legal things to consider and–of course–the small matter of payment. I’m a little concerned about one thing: the EBay API goes a long way to avoid letting an application get ahold of a user’s password, but the application’s identity is relatively easy to steal. In order to gain access to the site through the API, the application must provide a collection of identifing strings. My fear is that it is relatively easy to obtain these strings and impersonate my application. I’m sure that somebody else has thought of this, so I’m going to poke around a bit and see what I can uncover.

A few days ago, I listed some of the books that we’re going to be giving away at JavaPolis. I just learned that we’re also giving away a whole set of the Addison-Wesley Eclipse Series. I’ll just bet you wish you were going to JavaPolis now.

Mmmm… free books…

My review of the book is posted on EclipseZone. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.

I’m really excited about JavaPolis. We had another member come forward today to contribute to the Eclipse in Action sessions; I can’t wait to post the agenda we’ve assembled: it’s packed with technical sessions that will delight and amaze you.

In a previous post, I mentioned books. Here’s the list of the books we’re giving away at the conference:

• Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide>, by Ed Burnette
• Java-Entwicklung mit Eclipse 3.1, by Berthold Daum
• Rich-Client-Entwicklung mit Eclipse 3.1, by Berthold Daum
• Eclipse Rich Client Platform : Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications, by Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux

I’m not exactly sure how many of each of the first three books we’re bringing. I do know that it’s on the order of a “mitt full”. We’ve arranged to have 150 copies if the Rich Client Platform (RCP) book which is pretty darned exciting.

Incidently… I’ve completed a review of the RCP that should get posted on EclipseZone shortly (sometime next week). I’m sure Ed will let you know when it’s available.

The CDT Contributors Conference wrapped up tonight with a social event at a local pool hall. The event was well attended by lots of really smart people. To start with, Ward Cunningham was there. Early in the evening Dave Thomas showed up. Brian Foote was there as well. Of course, our celebrated leader, Mike Milinkovich was also there.

For me, it was also great to see folks like David Buck, Alan Knight, and Anthony Lander (who are perhaps lesser-known but still very smart).

I was speaking with a friend and frequent reader of my blog this evening. Dave pointed out to me that there is no indication on my blog of how to access it via RSS feed. I’ve added a link to the right that points to the Atom feed.

For readers who are not already aware (for the others, it’s probably too late, you might as well read on), Planet Eclipse provides aggregation for many wonderful blogs that focus on Eclipse.

I had originally envisioned the title of this posting including the word “anymore” at the end. However, that would be grossly inaccurate since Eclipse has not been just for Java for some time.

I attended a couple of the morning sessions for the CDT Contributor Summit, hosted by QNX, here in beautiful Ottawa. Curiously, you have to make your way down streets named after local bajillionaires (Michael Copeland Drive and Terence Matthews Drive) to get to the QNX office. But I digress.

I arrived in my usual form: late. The room was packed (standing room only) with people from all around the world. There were several folks from Scandinavia, Europe and North America. I’m sure that there were other geographies represented, but I didn’t have the opportunity to pry. In short, there were a lot of people, many of whom came a long way, who have an interest in enabling Eclipse to develop their C/C++ applications.

In the opening session, our illustrious leader Mike Milinkovich delivered a riveting talk welcoming the attendees. I learned a few things during the talk. I was a little surprised to learn that CDT has been around for a while. Mike described it as a pending “overnight sensation” that’s been three years in the making.

That’s right, CDT has been around for a long time. Almost as long as Eclipse itself; it’s one of the oldest Eclipse projects and has a very vibrant community built up around it. I know that I’ve been aware of its existence for a while, but since I’ve never actually used it, I guess that it kind of snuck up on me. Being firmly entrenched in the Java world, I’ve never used C/C++ for anything more than the occasional native code.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the entire conference. I did sit through a couple of talks on the work being done on debugging and some the challenges facing the team. It was clear to me that I was woefully out of my comfort zone, but it was equally clear that the folks in the room were not. I have a good feeling that some great stuff will be coming from this team. A social event is planned for tomorrow evening, so I’m planning to drop in and meet a few of the folks involved.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear that Eclipse has extended its reach beyond the Java language. The list is getting pretty long: Java, C/C++, Fortran, PHP, Ruby, ObjectAda, … As Ed says,”are there any languages that aren’t supported by Eclipse?” The list is getting shorter.

Now, if somebody would just build Smalltalk integration…

Eclipse is going to be at JavaPolis in Antwerp, Belgium in December. I’m really excited about this conference for a few reasons. To start, I’ve never been to Belgium. I’ve been close a few times, but I’ve never actually been in the country. I love Europe so I jump on just about any chance I get to visit (I even lived there for a while). But I’m more excited about the programme we’re lining up.

At JavaPolis this year, there is going to be an Eclipse In Action day (Tuesday, December 13th). We’ve got an auditorium to ourselves and we’ve lined up some great talks. We’re still putting the finishing nails into the agenda, but suffice to say that it’s going to be pretty cool. I’ll update my loyal readers (all four of you) when we’ve got everything settled. I can say that we’re wrapping up the day with a discussion of Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

We’re also setting up a “Plug-in Bazaar” (Monday, December 12th). Essentially, we’re setting up a room with space and tables for folks to show off their plug-ins. We’ll also have a projector setup so that that a few folks can present their plug-ins to the broader audience. We’re hoping that a few folks will also use the bazaar as an opportunity to spend some face-to-face time with folks they don’t get to see as often as they might like.

But wait… there’s more. We’ve set up a BoF on Monday, December 12th at 1930h to discuss Eclipse Rich Client Platform. We intend to keep the presentation portion of this BoF to a minimum and turn it more into a discussion than a lecture (the way it should be).

We’re going to be giving away some books during the conference. A lot of books, including Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux’s Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications.

I updated WTP to version 0.7.1 today and something curious happened: the option to edit HTML files using the HTML editor disappeared. Strange, I thought. When I reverted back to WTP 0.7, the ability returned.

I created a completely new and separate installation of Eclipse 3.1.1 to verify the problem. After loading WTP 0.7.1, everything worked as expected (I could open the HTML editor). However, after I loaded PHPEclipse 1.1.7, the ability to open the HTML editor disappeared again. I’ve raised bug #1336929 against PHPEclipse to address the problem.

In the meantime, I can still edit HTML files using the PHPEditor which seems–so far–to work fine. Using the PHPEditor has the added benefit of automagically updating the PHP Browser view (to preview the page) whenever I save.