Are you around the Dresden area?
If so it would be great if you join my presentation about Eclipse 4.0 / Eclipse e4. The german title roughly translates into “the unexpected simplicity of developing Eclipse plugin and Eclipse RCP applications”.
The talk will be in German and details can be found on Saxony Website. I’m looking forward to meet you.
As you know the Eclipse 4.0 SDK is out.
It also appears in discussions that some people don’t think Eclipse e4 is a good idea.
Other people seem to like it.
To help you to decide yourself I updated my Eclipse e4 Tutorial to Eclipse 4.0 Application Platform – Tutorial.
Together with Tom Schindls Tutorial you should be able to have a good start with Eclipse 4.0 SDK.
Please remember that the target of the core e4 Project is to improve the programming model of Eclipse and to provide an improved way of influencing the UI. The standard plugins are still the same and behave the same way.
My Tutorial also needs improvements, unfortunately it is not as far and deep as I like, but I hope that is will give you a good start. If you find issues, problems with my tutorial please let me know. The “more to come” section of my tutorial lists my future plans.
After some time and effort mainly by Denis Roy and Bernhard Merkle the e4 git mirrors are working.
You find the e4 repos listed Eclipes Git overview.
EGit is also kind enough to be able to import all the projects from the different levels of the projects.
So give it a try via EGit and check out the e4 source code, e.g. the e4 UI projects via git://dev.eclipse.org/org.eclipse.e4/org.eclipse.e4.ui.git or if you want to use http via http://dev.eclipse.org/git/org.eclipse.e4/org.eclipse.e4.ui.git.
I had the pleasure to present Eclipse e4 on the Java Forum Stuttgart on the 1 of July. It was really nice to have lots of people showing interest.
I also quite happy that the audience gave good feedback regarding the session. The e4 talk was ranked within the top 10 presentations (rank 6).
Thanks everybody to attending the talk and giving such a good feedback.
Susan F. McCourt created a new splash screen for Eclipse 4.0 via Bug report.
I quite happy to see this change, after almost a decade of watching the old one it is refreshing to see something new.
What do you think about this new splash?
I saw this question asked several times, therefore I think a short blog entry might help in solving a common e4 launch problem.
If you run e4 you need to include the declaritive service implementation into your launch config. If you don’t you currently receive the following NPE:
java.lang.NullPointerException at org.eclipse.e4.ui.internal.workbench.E4CommandProcessor.processCommands(E4CommandProcessor.java:52)
If you face such an error, make sure org.eclipse.equinox.ds and org.eclipse.equinox.util are included in the launch config.
I hope that at some point a better error message will be issued. Please see Bug 318821 for details.
If you are joining the Java Forum Stuttgart on the 01. July, I will be talking about Eclipse e4. While the slides will be in English my talk will be in German.
Hope to see you there.
Some people say that the Eclipse support for alternative JVM based languages is not best in class. Therefore I think it is great news that Olivier Thomann from the JDT team indicated that might open up JDT to better support Java like languages.
I think this would be great and definitely a mayor step for the Eclipse IDE. As far as I understood the Scala IDE and the Groovy support could be heavily improved if the JDT could allow these environments to leverage the JDT infrastructure.
I believe these are great news for the interested people and the Eclipse ecosystem.
I had the pleasure to connect Ken Rimple from Chariot Tech Cast and Boris Bokowski.
Learning about the upcoming Eclipse 4.0 release has never been easier.
Just tune into Chariot TechCast Episode 55 – Interview with Boris Bokowski on Eclipse e4.They talk about
I always enjoy the technical interviews from Ken, which covers sound technical details. And now you have a chance to learn about Eclipse 4.0 directly from Boris, the leading figure behind Eclipse 4.0.
What if you want to make a good first impression and show how different Eclipse 4.0 really is? How helpful is the following splash screen in this quest?
Lets replace this splash with something “cooler” for example this:
To do this open the folder “plugin/org.eclipse.e4.ui.examples.legacy.workbench+yourversionnumber”. Here you find the file “splash.bmp”. Rename it and put a new bitmap file “splash.bmp” at its place.
Ok, arguely the process is almost the same as for a standard Eclipse 3.x installation but I think its nicer to do this for e4 to make clear the difference.
I also need to thank Oisín Hurley who, to my understanding 
, expressed a strong affinity to mascots and encouraged me to promote the idea of a stuffed animal as a mascot for Eclipse. I think by this he earned a lot of our respect.
[just to avoid any misunderstanding the statement above is a joke, Oisin seems to dislike mascots...]
