I’ve spent some time over the past few days reworking the Eclipse Evangelism site. Perhaps the first thing that you’ll notice is that I’ve simplified the look of the page.

The second thing that you should notice is the list of “evangelism” resources. I’ve started cleaning up some of my talks and am posting the slides where other folks who might want to do some Eclipse evangelism can find them. So far, I’ve posted my “What is Eclipse?” and “Engaging with the Eclipse Community” talks (in Open Document and PDF formats). I have a couple of other talks that I tend to use a lot that I’ll be posting soon.

I’ve been going through a bit of a minimalist phase lately, so the “Community” talk feels a little clunky to me (it’s anything but minimalist). But having more content on the slides should make it easier for folks to reuse the materials. I have tried to include some instructor notes to make them easier to reuse. The presentations are released under the EPL, which is probably not the best mechanism for slides. I’ll have to look into relicensing them under more appropriate terms.

As noted on the page, I do intend to move the example code that’s found there into the Examples project. That should happen over the next little while.

The latest addition to the page is some new wallpapers contributed by Gavin Fung (see Bug 232145). Gavin has provided the image in two sizes. It’s pretty sweet looking.

I’d like to make this page be a place where people can find useful evangelism resources, including evangelists. If you need an Eclipse speaker for your event, send a note to evangelism@eclipse.org and we’ll try to help you out. If you fancy yourself as an Eclipse evangelist, please subscribe to the evangelists mailing list. Please make a point of sending an introductory message announcing yourself to the group so that we know a little bit about you.

I’ve been hacking over the last couple of days on an update to the Understanding Layouts in SWT (the original is here). I’ve had my eye on updating this article for a while, but have been skittish about tackling it because of all the screenshots. Bug 221251 forced me to look at it, and then one thing lead to another, and, well… I wasn’t planning to do anything this past weekend anyway…

To save time and make it easier to rebuild the screenshots if I ever need to, I’ve created a plug-in project that can regenerate them. I intend to put the project somewhere so that it can be shared and used by others (but need to figure out where).

The article was originally authored by Carolyn MacLeod and then updated (for Eclipse 2.0) by Shantha Ramachandran.

So far, I’ve only updated the style of the document to benefit from the new template (and removed all that icky MS-Word markup using a bevy of regular expressions), redid the screenshots and reworked some parts of the format and text. I figure that a full update needs to consider StackLayout and TextLayout, so I plan on spending a few hours working that in later in the week.

In the meantime, if you see anything wrong with the new version, I’d like to hear about it. Add your comments to Bug 221251 (or you can attach them here, but the bug would be a better place).

Well… mostly.

The code for the Eclipse Business Expense Reporting Tool (you may have noticed that I’ve changed what the ‘T’ stands for) has been checked into CVS per the approval of CQ 2310 and subject to the constraints of the parallel IP process.

I don’t consider this a complete example yet. The initial code contribution is only a starting point, and—while I think we’ve made a good start on implementing the values of the Examples project—there’s still a lot of work to do. To start with, there is an embarrassing lack of unit tests. I have added quite a lot of (hopefully valuable) comments, but more are needed. Additional documentation of the architecture is required, along with discussion of some design points, and links to other sources of useful related information. I also have some ideas for simplifying the bits that permit platform-specific (RCP, RAP, and eRCP) customization of the views.

I spent some time yesterday cobbling together a website for the example. The website has instructions (along with handy Team Project Sets) for obtaining the code and rudimentary instructions for setting up your environment to make sense of it all. I have started the process of creating the Bugzilla component for EBERT (Webmaster Matt assures me that the new inbox for the component will be online tomorrow). In the meantime, if you just can’t wait, feel free to create bugs against the “General” component and I’ll move them after the “Expenses” component has been created.

I’ve also requested that the old eclipse.technology.eep newsgroup be retired and replaced by a shiny new eclipse.technology.examples. The mailing list will remain examples-dev@eclipse.org (like most other Eclipse projects, the mailing list is intended for discussion amongst project committers).

Good times lie ahead.

I’ve added social bookmarking to some of the Eclipse Corner Articles. Specifically, it’s been added to the articles that leverage our “new” format. For example:

• Creating Database Web Applications with Eclipse
• Integrating EMF and GMF Generated Editors
• Defining Generics with UML Templates

You’ll (hopefully) notice a small bar in the top right corner of these articles.

I’ve been (slowly) working through updating the older articles to use the new format, so over time more of the articles will have this capability.

Have at it.

Stephen Schaub has updated his article titled, “Creating Database Web Applications with Eclipse“. The article’s abstract reads:

The Eclipse Web Tools and Data Tools Projects deliver a feature-rich environment for developing Java EE database-driven web applications. This tutorial walks you through the process of creating a simple database web application using Eclipse WTP/DTP, Tomcat, and the Derby database engine.

Enjoy

The new Eclipse Examples Project has been created, provisioned, and set to an incubation-conforming state. In short, we’re good to go. I have some code that’s ready to move into the project (pending PMC approval and IP review). But before that, we need to finalize a proper plan for the project. If you’re interested in participating in this project, add you name to the mailing list.

The GSoC timeline shows April 7, 5:00 PM PDT (00:00 UTC April 8, 2008) as the application deadline. Students, make sure you get your applications in!

FWIW, we currently have 120 submissions from students

Eric Rizzo received the Top Newcomer Evangelist award at EclipseCon 2008. In this podcast, Eric discusses his tireless work with the Eclipse newcomer newsgroup, getting help with Eclipse, and more.

The link should also soon be available on Eclipse Live.

The Google Summer of Code timeline is posted in the GSoC FAQ. According to the timeline, students have until March 31 to submit their project proposals. Don’t delay, submit today!

I just posted a video podcast titled “Creating an Equinox Service using Declarative Services“. This video podcast briefly describes Equinox services and goes through the steps required to create and run a service using the Equinox Declarative Services (in incubation at the time of recording).

For the recording, I cranked my screen resolution down to 640×480 and stripped down my Eclipse (Eclipse For RCP/Plug-in Developers Ganymede M5) to contain only the bare minimum user interface. I resized the output to the screen resolution of an iPod Touch (which I assume is the same as an iPhone). All-in-all, it worked out well. The results look quite good on my iPod classic: the text on the screen is small, but readable. I only just posted it on Eclipse Live, so I haven’t had a chance yet to see if iTunes can make any sense of the MP4 extension on the file.

I do sort of waffle a little in the middle when I discuss that, with declarative services, you can actually use a class instead of an interface (true), but I’m quite satisfied with it overall.

If you want to learn more about Equinox/OSGi Services and Declarative Services, Neil Barlett’s series on the topic is an excellent source of information.