The story of a Chair as a Platform!

Eclipse is a Rich Client Platform. A cozy chair is also a platform that can support 'rich' clients.

My friend Hima was kind enough to cast my chair as a hero in her story - The Chair. Take a break from your work and read a nice work of fiction.

By the way, she is in the middle of a blogathon, a blog a day for the entire month of July. Pretty tough huh!

madhu
EclipseBible.com

Eclipse Helios - A few interesting features!

An year old wait is over. Helios is out in the wild. Today morning, I downloaded Helios. Oops, my friend of eclipse download link got stuck. I went to the download link for the common public - eclipse.org/downloads. There goes the Helios Modeling Package.

Its a little annoying to see that GMF is not included part of the default bundles of modeling package. But, there is a quick way to install GMF in no time. I just hit the 'Install Modeling Components' toolbar button.

Some of the interesting features that captured my mind are,

1. Open an eclipse file from Command line

Based on SWT and the native launcher, the Eclipse Platform now supports opening a file from the command line.  If an instance of Eclipse is already running, that instance will open the file. Otherwise, a new instance will be started. 

2. A brand new OSGi console. You can watch whats under the hood of your eclipse ide. 

To open OSGi console, go to your Console View and select 'Host OSGi Console' from the view menu.

3. Eclipse Market Place Client

Thanks to the work by TaskTop, the creators of Mylyn, you can browse through all the interesting eclipse based apps quick and fast. Go to Help > Eclipse Market Place.

4. Headless Launch Support

A new headless plug-in "org.eclipse.pde.launching" is provided to launch applications without a user interface.

Thats all for now. Let me dig deep in to the Helios framework. View the other reviews on Eclipse Helios here.

madhu

EclipseBible.com

Patterns in Eclipse

Last Friday at Eclipse Day India 2010, I talked about,

Because brain is a pattern recognition system.

We saw the problem we face during software development. 

We learned that "writing good code is not just a good will of the programmer, but a social responsibility of the programmer".

We started with the pattern story. We saw how Visitor pattern is used in Eclipse Platform.

We saw how Observer Pattern is used to track Workspace Changes.

And we talked about six other patterns and how its used in Eclipse Platform. If you are interested to look further, you can check the slides of Patterns In Eclipse.

madhu
EclipseBible.com

A Beautiful Day - Eclipse Day India 2010

"Ubuntu is the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality - Ubuntu - you are known for your generosity." 

by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The organizers were generous, the sponsors were generous, the speakers were generous and the eclipse community was generous. And what a day it lead to! A day to share the knowledge acquired with years of experience working at Eclipse. We had excellent talks as you can see in the schedule. 

Holding the true spirit of FOSS we had free talks and free food - who said its not free beer ;). The organizers had put lot of effort for free - to arrange the venue, print the handouts, host the website. 

EclipseBible.com had sponsored the handouts for the event.  We offer eclipse training and consulting services. You can find the details at http://training.eclipsebible.com

The organizers were trying the best to cut the costs for the sponsors. Ankur even asked me to print the handouts (schedule + speaker bio)  in black and white to keep the cost less which I had to happily reject. The elegance of the eclipse should reflect even in the handouts distributed to the registrants. 


People from around 35 companies turned out including Bosch, IBM, Adobe, Google, Wipro, Accenture, and lot of startups.


madhu
EclipseBible.com 

Eclipse Day India 2010 - 1 more day to go...

"Not only individuals and interactions, but also a Community of Professionals" 

from Manifesto of Software Craftsmanship.

I believe the most important point in the manifesto of software craftsmanship is the third one - "Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals". Only a community can bring awareness and spread the news of software craftsmanship among software professionals. The backing of a group will help an engineer to foster his/her imaginations into reality. A community is formed by constant gatherings and knowledge sharing sessions. Software Communities help to spread the news about good coding practices, ethical standards of engineers, responsibilities of software professionals to the society etc etc.

This is exactly what we do in Eclipse Community gatherings. I am more than excited to attend 'The Eclipse Day India 2010'. Hope to see you there.

If you are not able to make it there, don't worry, tune to this blog, I will brief about the happenings of the event soon.

madhu
eclipseBible.com

Eclipse Day India 2010 - 8 more days to go...

"Patterns help you learn from other's successes instead of your own failures" 

by Mark Johnson.

8 more days to go for Eclipse Day India 2010. What is more interesting than to talk about myself ;). Today, I would like to brief about my talk in Eclipse Day India 2010 - "Patterns in Eclipse".

My passion is to talk about better programming practices. Seeing well written code is a gift. A talk about writing good code may not go well with the 'Eclipse Plugin Development' theme. Hence I chose the topic 'Patterns in Eclipse'. Design patterns are solutions to recurring programming problems. The 'Gang of Four patterns' are used extensively in the development of eclipse platform. I will brief about some of these patterns, and how they are implemented in eclipse platform. I hope this will motivate the audience,

• To write cleaner code.
• To dig deep into the platform
• Increases interest to explore the platform.
• Help to absorb some of these patterns to his/her daily development work.

The following patterns will be covered,

• Singleton Pattern (Accessing Platform and PlatformUI services)
• Strategy Pattern (Customize a viewer using providers)
• Observer Pattern (Resource Change Listener, SWT Event Handling)
• Composite Pattern (During creation of widgets)
• Proxy, Bridge Patterns (To access the file system)
• Visitor Pattern (To traverse through the file system)
• IAdaptible and Adapter Factories 
• Memento Pattern (Persisting workbench state)
• Virtual Proxy (Extension point mechanism)

All these patterns will be covered in 1 hour ;). I will flash the food in front and tell  "Hope you had a great lunch". ;) Just kidding!

madhu
EclipseBible

References - Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns and Plugins, Head First Design Patterns, Design Patterns for Dummies, Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

Eclipse Day India 2010 - 10 more days to go...

Ankur Sharma and Prakash GR teams up again to offer a feast of eclipse talks in the forthcoming Eclipse Day India 2010. The count down begins with just 10 more days to go.

It was great to see an idea taking shape to a concrete plan over the past few months. The event happens at the cozy Monarch Luxur Hotel, Infantry Road, Bangalore on 23rd of April, 2010. 

The agenda has lot of exciting talks. Even though I am eager to watch all the talks, few of my favourite talks are  'Dependency Injection in e4' by Chetan Kumar Kotha. I had attended Chetan's talk in last year's Eclipse Summit India and was quite impressed. My next pick is 'OSGi Tutorial' by Prakash GR. I try not to miss any talks taken by Prakash GR. Single sourcing with Rich Ajax Platform by Ankur Sharma is my next pick. RAP is a promising technology, but has less number of tutorials. A talk on RAP is a need of the time.    

From the abstract review team, we were concerned about "just one talk on e4". But, e4 1.0 is yet to release and there is enough time to gain the momentum.

As Ankur said, eclipse is getting a lot of love from Bangalore. Its interesting to see how a technology influences the imagination of masses. On Eclipse Day we will have more  insights on how eclipse is used in various firms across the city.

madhu
EclipseBible