javapolis 2004: Eclipse in Action by Eric Gamma

First published on December 13 2004 and tagged Tech . Java . Javapolis .

Eclipse in Action by Eric Gamma:

This is the first talk I attended: Starting the conference with Eric Gamma was a great kick-off. Eric is a member of the gang of four, the author of best sellers like "Design Patterns" [ISBN: 0201633612], co-author (with Kent Beck) of [http://www.junit.org/], current employee of IBM in Zurich, and member of the architecture team of the Eclipse IDE.

the eclipse architecture:

He gave us an enlightening insight of the eclipse architecture. The eclipse architecture is based on a micro-kernel, everything in there is a plug-in, so it’s lightweight and extendable, replaceable.

the plug-in icebergs:

He emphasized on the plug-ins "lazy loading" strategy: All the plug-ins are lazy loaded and thus accessible at start up, but only the top of "plug-in icebergs" is loaded, i.e. the plug-in user visible appearance defined through standardized xml declarative definition (icon + action class).

It’s only once the user triggers an action on a specific plug-in icon that the action class is lazily instantiated using reflection.

We also attended a non "demo-effected" demo on how to develop an eclipse plug-in. I am convinced: developing a plug-in is pretty simple and straightforward ! In a few seconds he built a plug-in user-friendly showing all the shared images contained in the eclipse package.

Doing that He showed us a few tips and tricks (all of them are well documented in eclipse help menu "tips and tricks").

Not just an IDE: a platform

He went on presenting how eclipse and SWT can be used to develop rich client applications:

-the first example was a "hello world" type calculator he quickly implemented, As the eclipse IDE is made of plug-ins, any stuff can be disabled in the UI, (or you may obviously use eclipse and SWT to produce stand alone applications).

-the second example was a "Eclipse Trader", a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse RCP ( Rich Client Platform) dedicated to the building of an online stock trading system [http://eclipsetrader.sourceforge.net/].