Mylyn at EclipseCon
, March 25th, 2009In spite of travel cuts, EclipseCon has been as lively and fun as ever. We had several presentations of Mylyn on Monday, the highlight being Rob and Steffen’s tutorial. The Eclipse awards were entertaining as usual. Bjorn-Freeman Benson roped me into doing a PowerPoint Karaoke session with Oisin Hurley. We had to give a short talk, to someone else’s slides, which Bjorn had selected and we had not seen before. We got a Higgins slide deck and contrived an elaborate pitch of how Higgins was the platform for Identity Theft 2.0. There were a lot of laughs.
Still ahead is my Mylyn: Redefining the “I” of the IDE talk in the keynote ballroom at 1:30pm today. I’ve got some new slides on our approach to integrating web services with Eclipse via both SWT/Browser bridging and a WS/REST layer for Eclipse. While embedding the IDE in the browser has been a hot topic with RAP, e4, and Bespin buzz, the hybrid approach we take also has some very neat properties and applications that I’ll show. Immediately after my talk Steve Northover and Boris Bokowski will show off some of the SWT technologies that make this approach possible. The nice thing is that in the upcoming Eclipse 3.5 release some of the very tricky stuff we’ve had to do in Tasktop’s browser, like invoking JavaScript form Java and vice versa, will now be available in the platform.
At 10:10 am on Thursday I’ll be on the Architecture Council Panel. A big highlight of Thursday is going to be the 50 minutes towards a better you session where David Green will present WikiText and Steffen Pingel will give what’s probably the first presentation dedicated to building Mylyn connectors. After that I’ll be on the Future of Open Source and Business panel at the co-located Open Source Executive Strategy Summit. The other panelists are leaders at Oracle, Cisco, the Bank of America and Microsoft, so I’m looking forward to representing the point of view of startups in the Eclipse ecosystem. One of the great things about Eclipse is the fact that small companies can play a big role in helping shape the technology that we all use.
Now back to smoothing the slides and demos for the 1:30pm talk…
March 25th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Hi Mick, actually invoking JavaScript from Java had been available in SWT with the Browser.execute() method. In fact it is available on eSWT as well. What is coming in 3.5 is the ability to invoke Java functions from JavaScript.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for pointing that out Gorkem, I had intended to point out that the round-trip was now posible and added “and vice versa” to that part of the post. We’ve been using the Browser.execute() method since the start and it has been serving us well. I didn’t realize that it worked on eSWT as well, good to know.