RE: [ide4edu-dev] Setting up a new developer help wiki area

["Miles Billsman" <miles@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Great idea Cory.

 

I was going to suggest something similar as it has only really struck me in the last month that a lot of things can be done through the plugin.xml file as you have mentioned on the wiki page. If possible, I would have liked this to have known more about this earlier.

 

I remember when we started , Wayne asked if we could note any things that would help us get up to speed faster on Eclipse development. The couple of things that I can think of are:

 

1.       Distinguishing between an RCP app and a plugin. Especially with regards to the out of date RCP app on the wiki page vs. the plugins that you download when you load up the team project set. Since I had no experience with RCP or plugins, I found it confusing trying to figure out how these two things fit together.

2.       I think I would have been more productive in the first half if I had been leveraging the capabilities available through the plugin.xml file. Perhaps new developers on this project should start by doing a couple weeks of tutorials (especially ones where they have to play with the plugin.xml) so that they get a good mental model of how the framework is meant to work. I found myself using the information at http://www.vogella.de/articles/RichClientPlatform/article.html a fair bit. I’ll put that link up on the page Cory has set up.

 

Cheers, Miles

 

 

 

 

From: ide4edu-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ide4edu-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cory Matheson
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 5:04 PM
To: Eclipse IDE for Education
Subject: [ide4edu-dev] Setting up a new developer help wiki area

 

Hello,

I've decided to go ahead and setup an area on the wiki where we can put general knowledge and useful tidbits of information to assist any new developers (aka next term UCOSP) with getting up to speed with the project (quicker if possible).

I've already started some work on it, and the URL is here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_IDE_for_Education/New_Developers


A couple more ideas I'm considering adding are:
- A little blurb about the mailing list, and setting up BugZilla to email you updates.
- A rough outline of the different plugins we have, and the code within them, their purpose, etc.
- A quick overview of the structure of an RCP app (to the best of my knowledge..) and some Eclipse conventions like IWorkspace vs. Workspace, internal packages that we should try to avoid, and a couple useful classes that have proven invaluable during development, etc. etc..

Anyone got any additional ideas on things to add? My hope is that the wiki can be updated with new information and links as time goes on.

Cory.