Eclipse Day India 2011

Anshu Jain started of the day with an excellent talk Eclipse - A Framework of Frameworks. In his talk he went through the design of a very simple calculator framework to explain all the things that Eclipse does - extensions, dynamic loading, plugin discovery etc. There was also a .cff file (calculator framework format) equivalent to plugin.xml in Eclipse. The example code from his talk is available at his site - highly recommended for someone starting of with plug-in development.

Ankur followed up with another great talk Good Practices for Plug-in Developers.  Some of the images he used to drive his point home were really funny and awesome. I thought my session JDT Bootcamp (JDT Tips and Tricks, and Extending JDT) went well, of course the fact that Satyam did a fantastic job of explaining the Java Model and the Search APIs helped a great deal.

There was a lot of interest in What's new in Java 7 talk by Ayush (the guy with the funny pose in the above pic), which was nice to see. After this Praveen talked about his experience at Adobe with migrating a Eclipse 3.x application to Eclipse 4.x platform. It was nice to hear that Adobe wants to stay on the latest Eclipse platform and has made considerable progress in this regard.

The day ended with an interesting talk about Eclipse UOMo project. Werner Keil gave a few funny examples on what can go wrong if the proper care is not taken in consistently interpreting the units, for e.g. if one team uses inches and feet and the another team interprets the values as meters and centimeters. The image of an upside down NASA shuttle because someone messed up the measurement units will always stay in my mind :)

Lastly a big thank you to SAP Laps for hosting the event! You have been a great host for Eclipse Day India 2011 and the demo camp in Nov 2010. However I would like to see the next Eclipse event in Bangalore hosted at a different venue - just for variety :) Maybe other organizations can step forward. 

I almost forgot, the 'discussion' over drinks in the evening with fellow Eclipse committers and Eclipse users was 'entertaining' ;-) Those who could not join us for drinks, please do next time.

e4 - Eclipse 4.x - Second Impression

I have been using the latest builds of Eclipse 4.x SDK for my daily work for the last 6 weeks. The overall stability has improved gradually, and the NPEs are quite rare now. Some of the bugs I filed were also fixed  quite quickly during M3 - Bug 325834 , Bug 327154. But there are still a few things which must work but don't.

• Ability to customize a perspective (Bug 320478)
• Ability to set or change key bindings (Bug 317299)
• Plus I am a bit confused about the 'Editor Area' introduced in 4.1 M3. Does this mean I should not create multiple editor stacks? Should I create multiple editor stacks only in the editor area? Will this editor area continue to take extra space as it does in M3? In 3.x we had a editor only area, are we going back towards that? M4 is supposed to have a more polished implementation of the 'Editor area', I will wait for that.

I am also hoping that Editor tab rendering could be improved significantly in Eclipse 4.x (Bug 325422).

e4 - Eclipse 4.0 : First Impression

Looks a bit funny

Off is On and On is Off - I saw that Build Automatically was Off so I switched it On, and then my code changes had no effect... few minutes later I realized that if something is turned Off in the UI, it may mean that it is actually turned On! e.g.Mark Occurrences, Build Automatically.  Or in the case of 'Edit > Smart Insert Mode' I cannot even toggle it.

Layout and minimized Views - I like the overall layout and the fact that I can put views in the editor area. I also like the way when minimized views are selected they open in a pop-up sort of a way. Overall the UI/layout feels nice.

Custom Key Bindings - mmh...

Order of menu and toolbar items - The ordering of items in menus and toolbars can be a bit different from 3.x versions. e.g. navigate menu, run/debug toolbar

I can use it for my daily work, except for some minor glitches and some funny behavior I have been able to use it for last few days. And I do like the layout, mixing of editors and views, and the overall feel of the UI to not go back to 3.x (at least for now).