I had lunch the other day with Doug Pollock and John Arthorne; Doug and John are joining me in coaching the upcoming code camps that we’re running during the Eclipse in Motion tour and we met to discuss how we’re going to run the camps (both John and Doug work a short distance away from the mammoth Eclipse Foundation Corporate Headquarters Building in sunny Ottawa). Doug will be joining us in Dallas on February 9th and John will be joining the tour in Atlanta on March 2nd. I couldn’t be more confident; jumping into these code camps with support from great minds like John and Doug should make my job easy. All I have to do is look smart. These guys just plain are smart. And experienced with Eclipse.

In fact, all of the committers we have joining us for the code camps are pretty experienced. Some of them work on the Eclipse project and are long time contributors. According to bugzilla, John has contributed comments to some 4,855 bugs, including a comment on bug #2 in October 2001. The point being that he has been around Eclipse for a long time [I’m not providing a link to all the bugs that John has commented on because it appears to put a lot of strain on Bugzilla]. Doug has also contributed comments to a staggering number of bugs (2,656).

These guys know the Eclipse platform as well as anybody. And so do the other contributors who are attending.

If you’re attending in Atlanta, be sure to bring your copy of Eclipse 3.0 FAQs for John to sign!

The Eclipse Wiki is a pretty cool source of information. If you’re curious about the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), there’s a section in the Wiki that discusses it and organizes a collection of links, references, books, etc… everything you need to know about RCP. It’s your basic one-stop-shopping source of information on RCP.

There’s lots of other information on the Wiki. While your there, be sure to look around and see what some of the other projects are doing…

How neat-o keen, golly-gee whiz is this?

Be sure to get your “Eclipse installed” sticker from your favourite Eclipse Foundation staffer. Coming soon to a conference or seminar near you.

The folks attending the Eclipse in Motion seminars will be the first large-ish group to get these very exclusive stickers for the low, low cost of absolutely free.

Before you can get one of these babies, you’re going to have to prove to us that Eclipse is installed on your laptop/workstation. Of course, statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that you do…

At least one reader of my entry a couple of days ago expressed concern that Eclipse 3.2 might require the use of Java 5. Well it doesn’t. No need for alarm. Apparently there are two plug-ins in the SDK that require the use of Java 5 and if Java 5 isn’t available, those plug-ins just don’t get loaded (apparently these plug-ins have something to do with annotation support presumably in the JDT).

So… there you have it. You can run Eclipse 3.2 on Java 5, but don’t have do. It will run just fine on Java 1.4.2. This should certainly make the GIJ/GCJ folks happy.

See, there’s been some big, big things, and some are bigger than others…

It seems that the desire to obtain Eclipse-branded merchandise is heating up. Bug #125649 seems to demonstrate that there’s at least some interest out there in high-quality Eclipse logoware. As I mentioned a couple of days back, we have started talking about starting up some kind of Eclipse Store at the Eclipse Foundation.

In the meantime, there is at least one source of Eclipse-branded shirts, hats, mugs, etc. (no thongs just yet) that you might consider. This supplier is not affiliated with The Eclipse Foundation, and we make no warranty on their quality.

On the darker side of things, I find the mug a little disturbing. Still… it does point out one important thing: it’s the love that makes Eclipse great.

It’s always nice to hear about folks who come back to Eclipse. Problems with their previous IDE combined with a very positive experience with WebTools 1.0 has brought this blogger back.