It seems that the good folks over at Novell have been working hard on Eclipse content. The Linux University for Developers page contains a bunch of Eclipse tutorials/demos that take you through the process of getting started with Eclipse on OpenSUSE Linux. I went through the first tutorial, titled “Getting Started with the Eclipse IDE“. If you’re new to Eclipse, it’s a pretty good place to start. It discusses how you go about loading Eclipse onto your workstation, and even gets into where to find and how to install useful plug-ins.

Unfortunately Gunnar, they also opted to not include “Sweet Home Alabama” for background music…

I’ve created my first screen cam demonstration of Eclipse. It’s all so very exciting for me. Can you feel the excitement?

This demo shows how you can use Eclipse together with JUnit to do top down development of Java code using a test first philosophy. Along the way, I make heavy use of code assist (ctrl-space) and quick fix (ctrl-1).

One of the key messages of the demo is that you shouldn’t be afraid of the little red Xs and lines in and around your code (indicating errors). As you develop from the top down, you’re going to make a lot of those little red Xs along the way. I tend to think of them as markers telling me what I need to do next.

One of the cooler (IMHO) features of Eclipse that is demonstrated in this screen cam is the ability to run code that contains compile errors. At one point in demo, I actually run the test code despite the fact that there is a compile error in the test class. Everything runs right up to the point where it tries to run the the method containing the compile error; at that point, it throws an exception indicating the error and moves on. In the case of a JUnit test class, it would just move on to the next test method. Try that with javac!

I doubt very much that any of you truly seasoned folks will get any real value from this. It’s really intended for people who are new to Eclipse. For those folks, enjoy!

Last night, I posted Cliff Schmidt’s “Open Source Licensing Explained” talk on the Eclipse Evangelism web site. This is the talk that Cliff delivered during the Eclipse in Motion Seminar series in San Diego, Dallas, Raleigh, and Atlanta. I imagine that this talk shares material with the tutorial Cliff presented at EclipseCon as well.

“Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs” by John Arthorne and Chris Laffra is one of my favourite books on Eclipse. I use it pretty much daily (at least I do when I’m wading into a part of Eclipse that I haven’t worked with yet). It’s true that some parts of some entries are out of date, but by-in-large I find the book to be a very useful resource. In general, if you follow the advice given by the book, comments in the code that it points you to will let you know if you should be looking elsewhere. I think that including a specific version number in the title of the book was a mistake: unfortunately, it helps reinforce the perception that the book is out of date even though it is still a very useful resource.

A while back, I defended John and Chris’ decision to not make the entire contents of the book available online for free. Sure that’d have been cool, but I respect an author’s decision to try and reap benefits from their hard work (I’m sure the publisher also had some say in the matter). But all that is behind us. John and Chris have put the contents of the book on the Eclipse Wiki. This is great for two reasons: first, the information is out there and is available to all (even those of us who are too lazy to go to the bookstore); second, it’s editable. Sure, only committers can edit the Wiki today (that may change), but the committers do tend to know a little something about the inards of Eclipse.

If you find something wrong with an entry in the FAQs, be sure to make a Bugzilla report against the Wiki so that somebody in the know can take a shot at fixing it…

I’m gearing myself up for a lot of time on the road. I’ll be carrying the Eclipse banner to Linux World (Boston) next week where I’ll be talking about Eclipse RCP. I’ll be getting some help staffing the booth in the Expo from Eric Clayberg (Instantiations), John Graham (Sybase), and Bill Hilliard (Intel).

I’ll also be talking about RCP and hosting an “Eclipse Nite” at Eclipse Forum Europe (May 8-11) in Wiesbaden, Germany. We’re still hammering out the details for Eclipse Nite, but we’re currently planning to mix a few short (15 minute) talks with opportunities to meet and work with Eclipse committers. Sort of a presentation/discussion/code camp hibrid with a bit of reception built in for good measure.

My talk on RCP focuses primarily on the Equinox component model, but also be covers packaging RCP applications that are extendable and updatable. I’ll probably drag out my wonderful EBay application since it seems that not everybody is as sick of it as I am…

I’m looking forward to Eclipse Forum Europe. I hope to see you there!

I presented a few slides during my short talk. I’ve uploaded them to the conference site and expect them to appear somewhere there. I’ve also posted them on the evangelism site. Due to obvious time constraints, there’s not a lot of material there. The slides are mostly scavenged from other talks that you can also find on the evangelism site.

So far, there’s three great bugs nominated by Eclipse developers (at least there are three at this point). I don’t imagine that one of them (132773) is going to get past the PMC (I’m a little distressed that it’s assigned to me), but two is a pretty good start.

Not sure what constitutes a great bug? Take a look at the list and see for yourself some examples of what the developers think are great bugs. Roughly speaking, we’re looking for bugs that affect one of the ten Callisto projects that ideally has something to do with the integration of two or more different projects. So if you discover a juicy bug in TPTP while profiling a web application that you’re testing with Web Tools, you should report it.

Heck, given the low volume of great bugs so far, you’d probably just do well to just mention that you have another project loaded in your environment when you encounter a bug…

In keeping with the Angelina Jolie theme established by Joel earlier in the week, I incorporated images of her and her beau in my short talk today. I tried to work in some Lynard Skynard, but could figure out how while keeping myself under the allowed nine minutes.

My demonstration during the talk was live, against real data. I showed how I use Eclipse Monkey to bring together components to browse images from flickr. In the process of the demo, I did a search on “jolie” and came up with the image shown below. It got a big laugh. Especially from me, because it was completely unplanned.

Ah… the wonders of the live demo.

The point of my talk was that RCP rocks for many reasons, but one of the bigger reasons is the component model and the fact that you can build very powerful, highly integrated applications with loosely coupled components. My example application is hardly “very powerful”, but I only had nine minutes. Each of the components I used is completely decoupled from all the others; a bit of JavaScript pulls everything together.

I’m surprised by the number of people who have asked for a higher resolution image of the “Eclipse Legal Process” poster that I blogged about yesterday (only two commenters on the blog, but I’ve been approached more directly by others). Okay, I’ll level with you… I’m surprised that anybody asked, and techically 3 is a number…

Have no fear, we will post this in PDF form on eclipse.org. Bjorn or I will blog when it’s available.

While I’m on the topic of Matisse…

I spoke today with Eric Clayberg from Instantiations. Eric is superhuman.

Instantiation’s Swing Designer now supports the GroupLayout layout manager that’s a huge part of fuss around Matisse (and a new addition to Mustang). It’s first class support that demos very very well. But it’s Eric’s brilliance that makes this even more wonderful… As with every other layout manager in Swing Designer (and SWT Designer), there is full support for roundtripping: you can change the code and have the changes reflected immediately in the visual editor. There’s no need for the “.form” file that Matisse requires to keep track of GUI information; Swing Designer works directly from the code, so you can actually import user interfaces from other tools (like Matisse).

There’s a lot of other cool things in WindowBuilder, like support for building perspectives, forms API-based windows. And… in a fit of nostalgia, they’ve resurrected the old Smalltalk WindowBuilder Pro graphic. Now that takes me back (and make me remember how much I miss Smalltalk… ).

Eric’s joining me in the expo at Linux World on April 5th. So if you missed him at EclipseCon, you can catch him there!