One of my close friend is a professor in Rajagiri Engineering College for Computer Science and got me introduced to the head of the Department. This engineering college conducts guest lectures from variety of technology verticals and they requested me to have a Eclipse lecture session. After a lot of initial planning we finally started a 5 hour series of lectures on Eclipse (Eclipse course).Eclipse Guest Lecture Series
In the first session i Introduced the basic idea of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and it’s win over the conventional text editors. We then moved on with different text editors like Notepad, Textpad, EditPlus, vi and then talked about the Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, JDeveloper as an introduction. Typically in the Engineering colleges there will be budget constraints and they seldom has access to expensive IDEs. The faculty and students are very excited to know about the IDEs and the role it plays in their day-to-day development life.
EclipseCon is one of the cool conferences that i want to attend every year. Even if you don’t use all the technologies and projects, this is a good time for you to get to know what’s happening in the community and see some cool demos and case studies. I attended first 2 days and gave my talk on “JSON Viewer and XPath Workbook” on Tuesday afternoon.
My long time friend Annalmalai gave a talk on the “India and Eclipse Eco System“. India has a great potential for any Eclipse based product vendors. Annamalai highlited some of the industries that use Eclipse and the technology usage (RCP, EMF, GEF and GMF) aspects. ANCIT Consulting is doing a lot of training and actively conducting DemoCamps all over India. For any one, who would want to get into Indian market and dont know where to start, i guess ANCIT Consulting will be the right point of contact.
Got a demo from Wayne Parrott and Jens Eckles from Genuitec on the FireFly Mobile Web Developer Kit Project. The cool thing is that the demo uses an iPhone simulation for the developers. I am waiting for the development kit to come out and play with.
Last but not the least, the tutorial by Kai and Benjamin was a very realistic and solution oriented presentation. They both talked about the finer aspects of the RCP development and the Mp3 manager is a nice application to start with and play around. I would highly recommend anyone who is struggling to convince your bosses about RCP to see this presentation.
Last couple of months have been quite hectic with my job and also in my personal life. Effectively this is my first blog entry this year on Eclipse. In the last one year i have been deeply involved creating XML manipulations and Eclipse plugins. XML and XPath development usually involves lot of experimentation with the XPath expressions and in the real time situations different functions and namespaces can get real creepy.
I could not afford licensing costs for the professional XPath and XML IDE integrations, i wrote one small “XPath Workbook” utility by my self. Even if would have got the license, i might not need all the features that a sophisticated plugin might provide. I am hoping that this is very helpful for others too, who would want to use it as-is or extend it further. I provided the downloads for update site and source on google code and in a short time i am planning to provide the documentation too. If you are working on XML/XPath centric projects, would encourage you to try this plugin and provide me feedback. I am also open, if anyone wants to participate or contribute to this project.
I am starting a small polling series about the IDEs (like Eclipse, JDeveloper, Visual Studio, etc…), Programming Languages(like Java, Ruby, Haskell, F#, etc…) and in general technology. Thanks to all those who respond. Please do leave some comments on your answer choices.
Today i received one “acceptance” and one “declined” message from the EclipseCon 2009 selection committee. My short talk has been accepted and the tutorial has been declined. I was just hoping that if my tutorial got accepted, i would have definitely attended EclipseCon 2009. With this year’s economy and the way companies are responding to the future training needs, my chances of attending the EclipseCon 2009 have touched ground.
I will definitely have a peek into the EclipseCon 2009 presentations. If i can’t attend, i can at least view the content.
I am excited to attend the much awaited DemoCamp and meet some Regional Community enthusiasts. Till now 21 got registered for the Regional Community and i am expecting this number to grow; i am sure that Bay Area has more companies working on Eclipse and its just the matter of time.
The DemoCamp started with the demo by Ingres Corporation – A quick tour of the Eclipse Data Tools Platform, which followed by an exciting presentation from Michael Galpin – Eclipse @ eBay.
I gave a presentation + demo on the Single Source; Three Runtimes, which definitely excited many people in the DemoCamp.
Oracle‘s Greg Stachnick gave a presentation and demo of the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. I am definitely going to use this OEPE in future, it has nice WebLogic integration features.
I metRandy Kerber and discussed EMF stuff and experiences. We are yet to find some users for EMF so that we can have some interesting discussions.
Last but not the least, i thank Ingres Corporation for organizing this DemoCamp (, beer and pizza’s too :)) where all Eclipse enthusiasts had an opportunity to share their experiences. Hoping to see more participation from the other Bay Area companies in future.
Running an Eclipse application on Desktop, Web and mobile platform seems to be an exciting and challenging task for many. With a clear and crisp APIs, Eclipse made this task practical and easier. Chris Aniszczyk has already posted an example of Tic-Tac-Toe on his blog.
Recently me and Trebor (another eclipse enthusiast) have done an exercise to get a sample application on top of these three (rcp, rap and ercp) run-times with the Ganymede release. In this three part tutorial we built a simple Personal Organizer application and ran it on RCP, RAP and eRCP.
First Part goes through the necessary steps to create the application and run it as the Rich Client Platform (RCP) application.
Second Part talks about the Rich Ajax Platform and how the existing code base of the sample RCP application can be adapted to run it on the RAP target.
Hope these tutorials and insights will help a lot of developers to understand these platforms and know the possibilities. I will be happy to hear your experiences in making the single code base run on these three different platforms.
After the Eclipse Day @ Googleplex, i was wondering if a similar thing can be organized in Bay Area. I understand that Googleplex event is a special one, however if anyone is interested, we can probably start a Regional Community in BayArea.
Please raise a hand if you are interested in sharing your thoughts, experiences and discussing the happenings in the Eclipse community. This is also an opportunity to meet Eclipse enthusiasts in Bay Area.
Send me a mail (suresh DOT madhuvarsu AT gmail DOT com) expressing your interest and I am glad to coordinate for future “Bay Area Eclipse Users Group”. If it’s too much of a work for me, perhaps i can get some help from Ian Skerrett 😉
Sciology = Science + Technology 