Eric Arseneau, a Lead Researcher at Sun Microsystems (and former Smalltalker), has offered to come in an show us a demonstration of the Sun SPOT Wireless Sensor devices on Wednesday morning next week (October 4, 2006) at 10:00 am.

Eric’s main area of research is in the Squawk VM technology. He promises to show us how he makes every attempt to be IDE agnostic.

If you’re interested and will be in the Ottawa area on October 4th, drop me a line to let me know you want to attend. Space will be limited. Contact me by either adding a comment to this blog entry or by sending me an email (I’m the only person named “wayne” at “eclipse.org”).

During our recent webinar on Eclipse Rich Client Platform, one of the attendees asked this question:

If we have some technical issues during RCP development work, where can we post our problems?

The answer to this question depends on how you define “issues” and “problems”. If the problem you have is a bug, then you should report it on the Eclipse bugzilla under the “Eclipse” project’s “Platform” product.

If the problem is a lack of understanding, there are several sources of information you should consider. First, there’s the RCP Wiki pages. Also on the wiki, The Official Eclipse FAQs is a good source of information on RCP and more. If you’re looking for help beyond what the FAQ can provide, try posting a question on the RCP newsgroup.

You should pick up a copy of “Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding and Packaging Java Applications“. It contains a lot of information on Eclipse RCP and will set you off in the right direction. You should also step through the Eclipse RCP Tutorial (parts one, two, and three). Other RCP resources can be found here.

Finally, there are companies that provide Eclipse RCP Services. Some of them are listed here.

Jeff McAffer and I presented a webinar yesterday on Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Unfortunately, the playback was interrupted yesterday by a server crash that sent us into the Q&A session a lot sooner than we had expected (and cut off about half of the presentation). If you missed out yesterday, you can get the slides and playback of the entire presentation here (minus the Q&A session). The webinar hosts should be posting the complete session, along with the Q&A, on Friday.

The playback includes the entire presentation along with a demonstration showing the assembly of a few pre-existing components into an RCP application. It runs about 53 minutes in length. Sorry for the Windows formats on these resources.

I’m going to spend some time over the next week or so posting responses to the questions posed during the webinar.

We finally managed to synch up our schedules after a busy summer so that we could present John Arthorne with his award from the Callisto Great Bugs Competition. The competition was designed to encourage the community to provide great bug reports as part of the drive to the Callisto release of Eclipse. John’s name was selected in a random drawing from the names of all the committers who nominated great bugs. The original plan was to award one committer and one bug submitter (also randomly selected) with an Eclipse bike from Pecco’s Bike Shop in Ottawa. John, however is not a bike rider and instead opted to get a new Dell laptop computer. Here is a picture of John accepting his award (and affixing an “Eclipse Installed” sticker to it).

Anybody who has been paying attention will recognize John Arthorne as a long time Eclipse developer (he’s been with the Eclipse project from the beginning), co-author of “The Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs“, frequent contributor to the Eclipse newsgroups, and a generally pleasant human being. Congratulations John, and thanks for all the hard work!

Channing Walton was our submitter winner; Channing did opt to take the Eclipse bike. Unfortunately, was impossible for Channing to pick up the bike at our office, so we mailed it to him in the UK. We’re still waiting for pictures of Channing enjoying his new ride…

I delivered a presentation for the Java Metroplex Users Group in Dallas, Texas last week. I think the talk went well; at least a few folks in the audience seemed to indicate that it went well and most people stayed around even after the pizza was gone.

Almost everybody in the audience was a current user of Eclipse. I wasn’t expecting this since the meeting was held in a Sun building (I figured there might be a few folks who use alternative IDEs). I spent most of the session using Eclipse itself (I only used a small portion of my presentation). We went through some basic test-first development using JUnit and Eclipse, and then when into the development of a simple “image viewer” plug-in.

I showed off some nooks and crannies of Eclipse that a lot of them hadn’t discovered yet. This is something that I like about Eclipse: you can get by on the basics of the IDE for a long time and discover gems along the way. I have to admit that I’m a little distressed that more folks don’t know about ctrl-space (code assist) and ctrl-1 (quick fix, quick assist); these are keystrokes that I can no longer live without. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this demo.

As I was leaving the presentation room, one of the attendees came up to me and told me, “you speak English well”. This caught me off guard. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I assume that she figured that we Canadians are all French. I wasn’t sure what to say. So, I reponded in the most polite way I could think of: “Merci”.

During this short talk and demonstration during the Eclipse Tailgate Party at Eclipse World 2006, Ihor Strutynskyj brought up an incredibly important point. Unfortunately, he didn’t make the point as explicitly as I had hoped (I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for him to say it–oh well).

The software that he builds for RPC Software is sold to multiple customers and is customized for each one of them. The application is built on top of Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). During the talk, he stated that the customization amounts to the construction of a few custom plug-ins to tune the behaviour of the application. The part that he didn’t explicitly state is that by being able to customize the application by extending it, he avoids having to fork the code for different customers. That is, they maintain a single code base and leverage the Eclipse extension point mechanism to customize the application by including some additional components.

Clearly, there is a lot of value in Eclipse RCP for ISVs. Being able to maintain a single code base for multiple platforms and multiple customers saves a lot of time and energy that can be devoted to adding value to applications…

Donald and I were sitting, comfortable and carefree, in the departures lounge at Ottawa International Airport this past Tuesday as we waited for our flight to Boston to attend Eclipse World 2006. Our comfortable and carefree existence was rudely interrupted by somebody (who I sure is very nice) announcing that our flight had been cancelled. No problem, I thought… I’ve had flights cancelled before. I called up the travel agent who worked very hard to arrive at the conclusion that she could not possibly get me to Boston before about noon the next day. This, of course, was a problem as I needed to be at the conference by 0830h the next morning to run a tutorial (more on this later).

In between expletive, Donald suggested that we drive to Boston. At first, I thought he was joking, but it turns out that he was quite serious. So, we collected our bags and headed to the Avis counter. We found out that they had a car with US plates and that they would be happy to let us drive it down to Boston for them; the best part is that they would only charge us $300 plus normal rental charges for the privledge of returning the car for them. We scoffed. Then we went down to the Hertz counter; they were willing to help us out for a mere $600 plus normal rental charges. Truly, it seems. Avis does try harder.

We rented the car and made our way to the highway. It turns out that Donald is a total driving machine. After a short stop for supplies, he drove the whole way himself with only a short stop (somewhere near Middlesex, Vermont) for dinner. He consumed three cans of Redbull on the way.

The trip went surprisingly fast. We had estimated nine hours, but only took seven. It rained briefly, but was otherwise ideal driving conditions. The scenery was breathtaking: Vermont at night is a beautiful mixture of charcoal gray skys meeting up with rolling hills of black (I understand that it’s quite nice when the sun’s actually up). We were pretty tired by the time the lights of Boston appeared (around 0100h) on the horizon; the tunnels of the Big Dig were mesmorizing. We dropped off the car and made our way (by taxi) to the hotel to catch a few hours of sleep before making our way to the conference.

Overall–at least for me–it was an enjoyable but tiring experience that I actually hope to repeat (some day).