Galileo Galilei, welcome

Is a great release, Eclipse 3.5 Galileo. I love the improvements in this release. I have found some bugs, it seems less stable than the previous version and slower for some tasks. Anyway I recommend updating.

Eclipse E4 the next generation

There are plans to change the name of Eclipse RCP to something else, I will make a post about it later. But I want to avoid confusion Eclipse E4 is a completely new version of the Eclipse Platform. Is a one of those software redesign that are wonderful and can only happen in the context of a project like Eclipse whose contributors are top professionals, domain super experts. Java is not only a language is also a culture, through Java frameworks, tools, books, community the developers get in contact with the cutting edge ideas of software design, development methodologies, testing techniques. Millions of programmers around the world trying to solve similar problems with the same tools make those tools evolve, that happens with Java and that is happening with Eclipse. If you read the Eclipse E4 design documentation you will discover how they are trying to apply those great principles of software design that are just being massively recognized by the industry and academy in the last few years. But the people implementing it are not just trying to look clever like Web 2.0 startup geniuses trying to do complex web apps with a stone age tool like Ruby. They are the early adopters os those great new discoveries of the software industry because they were there needing to solve those problems years before the rest of us. So I'm very excited waiting for Eclipse E4 to be ready to be used by the masses.
Read more about Eclipse E4 here

Eclipse newsgroups

The Eclipse community is big and rich, you will find a lot of interesting and smart people, individuals that love to help and contribute. One of the best places to ask questions related to Eclipse, the IDE, the platform, SWT, and any other related subject is the newsgroup server. Do you know what a newsgroup is? is like a forum but you don't need to visit a webpage you use a news reader clien. NNTP is the name of the protocol used to access this kind of forums. For beginners this is not the easiest way to ask a question because you need to register and install a news reader client but is easy! you can use thunderbird, then you go an create a newsgroup account in the Eclipse website and one! go and ask question there is a wonderful community waiting to help you.

Eclipse LIve

Eclipse Live is your source of multi-media material about Eclipse projects and Eclipse-based products. You can register for a live webinar or browse and view webinars and podcasts their extensive library. My life would have been really different (better, happier) with a result like eclipse live but 15 years ago when I was a VB programmer, when every piece of information was so difficult to get. The knowledge bases in .HLP format, do you remember? I'm almost crying... :~(...

Eclipse SWT: Standar Widget Toolkit

SWT is awesome. Many people still associate Java with ugly graphical user interfaces. It is really unfair and makes me sad, I suffer a lot every time I heard comments about Java GUIs. I'm a very sensible person? may be. SWT is a toolkit to build Java GUIs. Most Java applications you know are proably using SUN's Swing. Swing is the official GUI toolkit, it provides the buttons, the text, the input boxes, all the widgets that you see in any GUI.The look and feel of Swing applications is pluggable, allowing a choice of look and feel. For example, the same program can use either the Java or the Windows look and feel. SWT is an open source widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented. SWT is a really think layer over the operating system, a lightweight library that wraps the operating system specific UI objects into standard easy to use well-designed Java classes. I will talk a lot about SWT in this blog so take it as the first introduction.

Azureus/Vuze

Azureus, Probably, the first application using Eclipse technology I have used. And one of the most popular ones. Is a Bittorrent open source client. Full of great features, for advanced P2P users that need to know every detail about the transfers, peers, performance, network status. Many plug-ins are available making it more interesting and powerful than other p2p clients. I thought it was based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, but it doesn't seem to be the case, looking at the source the plug-in system is not OSGi. It seems they only use SWT but not the RCP framework

The german guide

Soon after googling about Eclipse RCP and SWT related information you will find the german guide to the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Lars Vogel, did an excellent job making it and keeping it up to date with the latest changes in the API.Don't miss it! Eclipse Rich Client Platform Tutorial

Discovering the framework

Hello readers.
First I found some cool applications and as a developer I was curious about how they were done. Java, but with native looking GUI's. Soon I discover the great advantages of the Eclipse RCP platform, but the documentation was not as excellent as the design and implementation of the framework, so I'm starting this blog to share my experiences learning this exciting technologies.