Found a candid review of a guy’s impressions on 3.3M5 (related to Ruby development). Thought I would share.
Sprint, OSGi, eRCP
By Chris Aniszczyk
Forgive me for not posting this bit of news with a direct article link, but I recalled this bit of information from my memory by reading an EclipseCon 2007 talk abstract. At the last Sprint Developer’s Conference, there was mention of Sprint moving to OSGi and possibly using eRCP in their next generation set of devices. In my opinion, this is huge news and just goes to show how OSGi (and Eclipse) is being adopted throughout industry.
If anyone has a direct link to an article, that would be great!
Plug-ins? Applications? Widgets? Gadgets?
By Chris Aniszczyk
I like to pay attention to things that affect Eclipse, but outside the Eclipse community. In particular, I like reading Mary Beth Raven‘s design blog used to gather feedback about the design of the new version of Notes (that is based on Eclipse). It seems there is an interesting conundrum regarding how plug-ins should be perceived by “Samantha” (design persona for joe user). Most of us in the Eclipse community are developers and are used to the concept of plug-ins, but now it seems like the notion of plug-ins will be available to a whole new set of users. Do normal users understand plug-ins? Should they be renamed to something else? I think this is a fairly interesting discussion so I linked Mary Beth’s blog if people want to comment.
Sneak Peak of PDE 3.3M5
By Chris Aniszczyk
The PDE team has been spending a lot of late nights the past few days working on getting everything ready for 3.3M5. Here’s a sneak peak of just some of the things coming in by the end of this week 🙂
Bringing Sexy Back to PDE Form Validation
Mike Pawlowski has done a fantastic job in improving the PDE editors in 3.3M5; this is only a snapshot of what he has done 🙂
Update Site Target Provisioner
I have spent the past few days working on an update site provisioner for PDE. What this basically means is that you can goto your Target Platform preference page and add plug-ins to your target platform by pointing to update sites 🙂 This is all part of PDE’s provisioning story, and if you think about it, there is the possibility of adding target provisioner’s that can work with OSGi’s OBR or maybe those crazy Maven heathens can figure out how to integrate a target provisioner for a Maven-based environment.
This is only a small sneak peak of what the PDE team has accomplished for 3.3M5, so please pay attention to the New & Noteworthy for everything 🙂
Article: Building Templates with PDE
By Chris Aniszczyk
Ever wanted to know where those fancy templates come from in PDE? Well, I have a new article that goes over some of the facilities PDE provides to hook in your own templates. It’s my hope that people create more templates for their projects as one of the things that I found that helped me greatly learning about Eclipse was the templates. How cool was it to generate a RCP mail application in a few seconds!?
Vive le Forms!
By Chris Aniszczyk
The 3.3M5 release of Eclipse is looking exciting (hopefully Ed Merks will not cause an M5a release), especially with the new changes surrounding Forms. Just giving people some heads up here and hopefully this will increase the adoption of Forms in the future.
Ctrl+AWESOME
By Chris Aniszczyk
Maybe I’m late to the game on this one, but I have discovered the greatest Eclipse thing since Ctrl+Shift+T, apparently, if you do a Ctrl+E (thanks Boris), you get a pop-up with just about everything you care about. It’s hard to explain, just do it 🙂
What’s in a name?
By Chris Aniszczyk
While looking at the last meeting minutes from the Eclipse Planning Council, I came across an interesting entry:
Future Simultaneous Releases
We chose “Ganymede” for the 2008 release and “Io” for the 2009 release.
*blinks*
I thought part of the fun was allowing the Eclipse community to choose a name they would like (as long as its appropriate, otherwise you can come up with stupid names like Warty Warthog ;p)
Do people like Ganymede or Io? I understand we have the Jupiter moon theme going here at Eclipse, but you know, there are other cool Jupiter moons like Elara or S/2003 J12 that need some love too.
JRE Export, Extreme Makeover Edition
By Chris Aniszczyk
I revisited the JRE export feature after getting some good feedback from people and a bug report (that’s how open-source works, right? ;p). In the next I-build, the product editor will be enhanced to include a new section for JRE bundling in the Launching tab (Note, the margins are a bit off now, but you get the idea ;o).