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.
We’ve received many wonderful applications; I’m really looking forward to this term’s GSoC.
Students, you need to submit your proposals through the Google Summer of Code system. You can find it here: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/. You will have to register with Google if you want them to pay you for your efforts. We are always happy to accept applications through other mechanisms, but if you don’t register with Google and submit your application through the Google Summer of Code site, you’re not getting paid.
Don’t send your proposals to me via e-mail. Send them to Google. Don’t send them to Philippe, Anne, or EMO, webmaster, or legal@eclipse.org. You can post them on the SOC mailing list or newsgroup if you’d like, but you must also post them on the Google Summer of Code system. Feel free to drop me a note letting me know that you’ve posted your proposal, but that can’t be the only communication.
Remember that we don’t need your entire résumé as part of the application. A short bio accompanying your well-thought out project description will do. Show us that you’ve done your homework (the fact that you’re reading Eclipse blogs is a good indication of doing at least some of the homework). Make us believe that you’re working on something that has value for us, and that you’re going to get the work done.
In case you’ve misplaced the link, you can post your application for participation in GSoC with Eclipse here: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/.
Google has opened their Summer of Code 2008 application system up for students, so now is the time. The student application deadline is March 31 @ 5pm PDT.
We have already received a bunch of applications and there’s some good stuff. There are also a lot of incomplete proposals.
Students, it’s not enough to send us your resume along with a one-line description of what you intend to work on. In fact, I don’t want to see your resume. What I want to see is that you’ve done some homework: state your project idea, give us some description of the scope (i.e. what do you expect to complete in the time available), describe any work that you’ve done toward the goals already, ideas you have for implementation, technologies (especially Eclipse technologies) that you’d leverage as part of the implementation, etc. The one-line titles and one-paragraph ideas on the Ideas page should serve as a starting point, not the complete answer.
Mentorial candidates, if you haven’t been accepted as a mentor yet, please send me a note (wayne_at_eclipse_dot_org) and tell me who you are and relevant experience that qualifies you to work as a mentor on behalf of the Eclipse Foundation (”I’m an Eclipse committer, you idiot” is a valid and fully complete response). You don’t need to be a committer, but we (the existing mentors) have to get that warm-squishy feeling that you have your Eclipse-chops.
Unfortunately, the application process that Google uses is open only to mentors. If you’d like to see the applications, considering adding yourself as a mentor. Pending permission from Google and the student submitters, we will be posting project proposals that pass our initial vetting to the newsgroup.
Adam Archer’s article, Eclipse Forms: New in 3.3, is now available on Eclipse Corner Articles. In this article, Adam extends the basics covered in Dejan Glozic’s Eclipse Forms: Rich UI for the Rich Client. In the article, Adam discusses the new features of Eclipse Forms, providing many examples (with screenshots).
Today, we published Miguel Garcia’s article, “How to process OCL Abstract Syntax Trees“, on Eclipse Corner. The abstract states:
The Model Development Tools Object Constraint Language (MDT OCL) project provides the building blocks for Model-Driven tools to weave OCL declarative specifications into software artifacts. We showcase some of these possibilities, taking as starting point a plug-in to visualize OCL abstract syntax trees (ASTs) in the form of annotated trees. This example motivates some practical tips about patterns for OCL visitors, including using Java 5 generics and achieving conciseness by letting MDT OCL take care of the “walking” order. To really reap the benefits of OCL-enriched specifications, tools in our modeling chain have to be able to transform such expressions into the target software platform (e.g. compile into Java, translate into SQL). Work in this area is summarized, to ease jump-starting your own OCL processing project.
This article has me brainstorming how I can use the OCL in an example.
I also added an excellent new book titled “Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java Web Applications” to the resources page. This book, authored by Naci Dai, Lawrence Mandel, and Arthur Ryman is great source of information about the Eclipse Web Tools project. I spoke with Naci Dai about web tools at EclipseCon; the podcast from that conversation is here.
Today we published an article on Eclipse Corner titled, “SWT/Swing Integration”. This is a pretty important topic that is of great interest to a lot of folks. The article was written by Gordon Hirsch, based on some real world experience with the SWT_AWT bridge component (which allows you to host AWT/Swing components in SWT). The abstract of the article states:
Swing and SWT are sometimes seen as strictly competing technologies. Some people have strong opinions on which UI toolkit to use exclusively for client applications. However, in the real world, ideological extremes are often impractical. Some valid use cases require both technologies to coexist in a single application. While mixing the two toolkits is not a simple task, it can be done, and it can be done such that the two toolkits are smoothly integrated. This article discusses the steps necessary to achieve good Swing/SWT integration. It focuses on the use case of embedding existing Swing components into an SWT-based Rich Client Platform application.
You can find the article here.