Last Friday, I spoke with Ralph Mueller, Director of Eclipse Eco-System Development in Europe about the upcoming Eclipse Forum Europe (ESE) 2007 Conference being held on October 10-12 in Ludwigsberg, Germany. You can listen to the conversation here. More podcasts can be found on the Eclipse Live site and newsfeed.

Speaking with Ralph made me think of how great a conference ESE is, and I’ve compiled a list of six reasons to attend Eclipse Summit Europe:

1. Last year was a lot of fun; it can only be better this year.
2. There are some killer keynote sessions this year, and the rest of the programme is awesome.
3. The symposia and workshops will be held the day before the rest of the conference, so you can attend both.
4. Attendance is purposefully kept small so that it can be hosted in a cosy venue which makes ESE a great place for networking with other like-minded individuals, and organizations.
5. There’s beer
6. I’ll be there. You can meet and chat with me. Seriously, how often do you get to meet somebody as fascinating as I am?

All kidding aside, it’s a great conference and I look forward to seeing you there.

Two weeks ago, I informed the EMO of my intent to propose a new “Eclipse Examples Project” (EEP! for short). I had tried to work out a name that would result in the acronym “EEK”, but I couldn’t make it work (but I digress).

The idea behind the project is to create examples of applications and plug-ins that use Eclipse technology that ideally spans multiple projects. I’ve used the word “ideally”, because I want to avoid excluding examples that might otherwise be useful and interesting. This is a natural extension of work that I do anyway: as part of my evangelism efforts, I use a handful of example applications that I’ve created to show off some of the great things that you can do with Eclipse (and in many cases, I use ‘em to show how you go about actually implementing those great things).

The idea of turning this into a project came from the excitement generated by the Sudoku game I created sometime last summer. The code that I produced has been picked up by a few people and extended in some pretty cool ways. First, I received a plug-in that did a way better job of generating puzzles than I did (which, embarrassingly, I still need to make available). Then a plug-in was provided that allows multiple people to play the same puzzle using ECF. Then, it was enhanced to run on hand-held devices (this has actually resulted in the code being checked-into DSDP eRCP as an example for that project). There’s talk of extending the example into the RAP world. Clearly other people want to add their input into these examples, and making a separate project (where we can more easily manage additional committers) is probably the easiest way to make this happen. If you want to see how this evolved, check out Bug 145258.

The activity around the Sudoku game is exactly what I’m hoping for from the EEP! (I think that the exclamation mark has to be a necessary part of the short name). I have some other examples that I hope have similar potential, including an organizer application that I’m working on integrating Higgins into, an RCP application that can be used to browse EBay auctions, and a handful of generally-useful plug-ins.

I figure that each of these examples, in order to be useful, needs to be thoroughly documented and test infested (the natural result of the developers being test infected). Examples need to be implemented as extensible platforms. Above all else, the examples need to be as simple as possible so that they are as easy as possible to understand. I’m not sure if graduation makes sense for this project, so there may never be a version 1.0. At least this is what I’m thinking for now.

I have a few people on board with the project, but am looking for more. If you’re interested drop me a note (wayne_at_eclipse_dot_org). I’m planning to put the proposal together over the next few days, and I’d love your input into that process.

“Inside the Memory View: A Guide for Debug Providers” by Samantha Chan has been published. This article discusses—oddly enough—how to use and extend the Memory View. The abstract states:

There are many programming languages that allow access and discrete control of system memory. If you are a debug provider for one of these languages, then you probably have a requirement to provide support for debug-time memory inspection and manipulation. The Eclipse debug framework provides a Memory View, along with an extensible framework to simplify and standardize this task. This article introduces the Memory View and describes how to add your own customized memory support.

Paul Glezen has updated his “Branching with Eclipse and CVS” article for Eclipse 3.3. The new article is a two-parter: part one presents a brief branch-and-merge scenario designed to quickly illustrate some branch-and-merge features, and part two shows how to rebase a subbranch with changes from the main branch before merging the subbranch back into the main branch.

The uptake on Mark Dexter’s “Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners” tutorials has been nothing short of phenomenal. He’s showing some impressive (no, staggering) download statistics and a discussion thread attached to his project is filled with kudos. Mark is helping a lot of people get started with the technology and he’s doing a great job of it.

Perhaps the most encouraging part of all of this is that my sorry attempts at providing timely feedback to Mark hasn’t soured him to the process and he’s planning still more tutorials. He’s looking for feedback; if there’s something you’d like to see, connect to the above thread and let Mark know your thoughts on the matter.

You can find links to Mark’s tutorials, along with other useful materials, on the Eclipse Resources page and on Eclipse Live. I’m in the process of addressing Bug 201115, which helpfully suggests that we add a new tag to the resources page to make “Getting Started” resources like this one easier to find. Hopefully, I’ll get the bulk of it done today; if you have any thoughts concerning resources that should have this tag added, let me know by adding your comments to the bug.