Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Some of you may know that Eclipse has a burgeoning IRC community. From my opensource experiences, I believe a strong IRC community can have an incredible impact on how the community perceives a project (think Gentoo). Some old–timers may recognize IRC as a cesspool of activity, however, times have changed a bit. It’s a great public forum and a lot of the SOC students have been using it to get help for their projects.

I just wanted to let people know that the ECF IRC provider has recently been updated to support tabbed-browsing and fixes some disconnect issues. I encourage people to file bugs against ECF if they want to see feature improvements regarding the client, or get involved themselves 😉

On a side note, the more I use Eclipse, the more it feels like Emacs… in the sense that I can do everything from within my Eclipse shell 😉

Not sure if people noticed, there is a new (and fantastic) Eclipse Corner article posted that discusses a favorite topic of mine: Model Driven Development. The article is a bit heavy if you haven’t touched EMF before, however, it’s amazing to see how quickly you can crank out a graphical editor with GMF. If you come across some time today and want to learn about EMF/GEF, listen to Ed Merks tell you “a model is a model is a model” on a recorded webinar. I find that seeing this style of development live, is a lot more powerful than what you can get out of an article.

At EclipseCon this year, I ran into some developerWorks folks who wanted an article like the PHP reading list they had, but for Eclipse. After a couple drinks and some persuasion techniques, I agreed. Well, after completing it a couple of months ago, it finally went live today. I tried to list the things that were most relevant to me as an Eclipse developer and that I personally found useful. If you have anything to add, feel free to comment and I will do my best to get the article updated.

On the swooshy bar,
stands our mighty
perspective switcher,
its utility
guides us
through the maze.

Maybe I’m the only one, but do people find that the perspective switcher never has the perspective you’re looking for (similar to the way the properties view is always missing from the Window->Show View)? Eclipse being an open-source project, lets me dig through its code anytime, so lets investigate…

Ok, I’ll stop, I love team harry potter (Platform UI), I really had nothing better to blog about this morning 😉

Oh that reminds me, the eRCP project release 1.0M9 which finally sports eUpdate which is like a mini-cute update manager for your eRCP-enabled devices.

Just to keep people in the loop about Eclipse’s Summer of Code progress… one of the students, Ahti Kitsik, has released initial support for word wrap in Eclipse. I’m sure he would appreciate any feedback 🙂

After fixing a JET related issue this evening, I noticed there is a webinar coming up on EMF / GMF. I recommend people attend to get an idea of one way to do model driven development in Eclipse. If my feelings are correct about this webinar, it should show something I’ve wanted to show off for awhile:

• EMF Model Creation
• GMF Mappings
• GMF Editor Creation

Rich and Ed are great guys, give them an audience 🙂

I figure I would give an RSDC report to everyone, from a developer’s perspective (I’ll cut through the BS ;p). The most interesting topic of the conference was Jazz. The guys decided to do a really cool live demo (with free beer) of Jazz. I saw some really cool things, the coolest however was a Visual Studio Jazz client. I swear on the Eclipse bible, there was a Visual Studio Jazz client that performed an action that was propogated to the other Eclipse client guys.

Another thing I would like to mention is, the notion of ‘Open Commercial Development’…? Open what? Open defects/features/bugs? First one to explain this topic to me gets a cookie.

Also, I’m proud to say the Jazz team syndicates Planet Eclipse live in their demos.

As Wassim pointed out, PDE now has support for hyperlinking (thanks Janek for the assist).

This gives me the segue to work on Equinox DS source editors. If you find anything missing regarding hyperlinks, please comment on this bug. Anyone have other PDE issues they want to address?

I finished my morning presentation today about ECF and got some great feedback. It seems ECF may have a new recruit to implement rudimentary shared debugging within Eclipse (yay). More importantly, I’m a sucker for free drinks. There will be a blogger meetup at the hotel bar, Tuesday @ 6-8pm. Thanks to Stephen O’ Grady for pointing this out, because free booze is awesome 😉

Well, I’ll be damned! On my plane ride over to Orlando, I managed to get an ECF-enabled Sudoku client working (when my battery was dying on the plane, I had to pull some Paula Abdul crazy hacks to get it working though)! It gets me thinking about what can be done if someone actually put forth a serious effort to add more ECF UI polish , remove my dirty hacks and add chat features via ECF. Donald may finally have his viral application ;P

Hell, I could even imagine a TetriNET like Sudoku thing going on if someone had a lot of time on their hands 😉