Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I’m back after a brief hiatus (vacation/work). During my “hiatus”, I attended the ACM World Finals. It was cool to see a lot of Eclipse usage amongst students:

During the competition I did some informal survey’s of students to see their Eclipse usage and found that CDT usage was unusually high (shenanigans!) amongst students who use Eclipse: ~75%. In general, it seems about a fourth of the students use Eclipse for general development (just about zero use PDE, sorry Wassim).

As for an Eclipse annoyance, I was messing with global installhandlers recently to come across the magical identifier problem. To use a global installhandler, you need to reference one via id (see docs) I think I tried about five different combinations of id’s until I just debugged the code to find what was going wrong (docs didn’t make it clear what to put for the id). For future reference, the identifier is made up of the plugin id and id of the installhandler combined.

I’ll be attending the ACM World Finals in sunny San Antonio, TX on behalf of my employer. How does this relate to Eclipse you may ask? Well, each of the development machines that the students will use contains Eclipse 3.1 loaded with the JDT/CDT (for programming ownage).

Oh what’s that, no Netbeans? I’m hoping there are some Netbeans girls at the event because I missed out on my picture at EclipseCon 🙁

At EclipseCon I was petitioned/volunteered to write an article about a recommended reading list for Eclipse, similar to the recent PHP reading list. If any of you out there have an article or book that you hold dear to you about Eclipse (or any of its projects), please let me know.

Also, it feels very good to be back in Austin, hacking from my favorite local coffee shop.

I hope everyone had a safe trip back home from EclipseCon 🙂

A couple of months ago I had a stay for IBM at Research Triangle Park, and since there is nothing to do in the Raleigh/Durham area, I cranked out an article on eRCP with a fellow colleague.

If you have solid knowledge of RCP development (including SWT/JFace), you too can crank out your first bare-chested Eclipse evangelist eRCP Hello-world application.

I’m not sure if people know this, but a new Eclipse magazine was launched called EclipseReview. I have an article in it that gives a tour of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (including a mention of some EMFT projects along with a GMF shoutout).

Please checkout the magazine and support it as I’d like to have a full-blown Eclipse magazine in the US.

I was going through my photos and came across this awesome photo of our hard-working eclipse.org webmaster (don’t piss him off):

All I have to say is wow… I used CDT in its early days (~1.0) and it has come pretty far. An interesting tidbit about CDT is that to test some scalability they actually imported the Mozilla project into the CDT.

Please check the CDT out 🙂

After leaving the craziness that is Austin, TX during SXSW, I’m pleased to have touched down in San Jose this afternoon.

I recommend everyone at the conference hang out in #eclipse-con on IRC.

If you’re new to IRC, I recommend grabbing the ChatZilla client for firefox or stopping by the IRC BOF that should happen sometime during EclipseCon.

The ECF article I wrote awhile ago finally went live today at the developerWorks site. In the article I give a brief introduction to ECF and implement an example provider for the Yahoo messaging service (using jymsg). If you want to play with the example yahoo provider, I recommend checking out the updated code from ECF’s secondary CVS server: ecf1.osuosl.org/plugins/org.eclipse.ecf.provider.yahoo

Hey Ya’ll, I took a new position with IBM Lotus today to work on their next-generation Eclipse-based (RCP) server-managed platform (and to do some open-source Eclipse work, stay tuned for details). There will be a pedestal at EclipseCon demoing this product which I’ll have to invest a few hours into 🙂

I also got a surprise package today in the mail from the Eclipse foundation:

It pays to do Eclipse Corner articles, you get Eclipse swag!