Wayne Beaton's blog

I attended a talk a few days ago in which the speaker was talking about some of the challenges faced by organizations building plug-ins. He stated something to the effect of “if you have six separately deployable (i.e. not interdependent) plug-ins, then there are ‘six factorial‘ (6 x 5 x...

I’ve been looking into the use of eBay from an Eclipse RCP. The good news is that it works; at least, I’ve had some success. eBay provides a site for developers where you can get a software developer’s kit (SDK) that includes almost everything you need (more complete examples would...

On September 15th/2005, I wrote about the WebTools Project (WTP) and some issues that I encountered while trying to create a client for a web service in a plug-in. It turns out that this support is in-plan for version 1.0. In a response to bug # 109625, Chris Brealey wrote...

At the Eclipse Foundation, we tend to eat our own dog food. Foundation employees use Eclipse itself to generate content for the website (I can’t speak for individual project teams, but I’m pretty sure that most of them do as well). In particular, we use PHPEclipse to create and edit...

Yesterday, I wrote about the ability to drop URLs onto an SWT component. I’ll pause for a couple of minutes while you go back and review it… I found an entry in Bugzilla ( bug #100095) that’s asking for the URLTransfer class to be made public. It seems that the...

I was asked a question today about whether or not Eclipse RCP can integrate with Firefox. The short answer is “yes”. The longer answer is “what do you mean by ‘integrate’?”. An RCP application can, for example, be the drop target of a link dragged off a browser. SWT code...

If you’re using RCP or even Eclipse itself, you’re using SWT. So… who’s using SWT? Lots of folks are. Ian Skerrett gave some examples of folks using RCP (and SWT by extension) in an blog entry several months back. If you’re using RCP/Eclipse, you’ve also been using Eclipse’s OSGi implementation...

I guess that the name “Rich Client Platform” should be a tip-off that applications built using RCP technology can extend beyond the desktop. Essentially… if you have a client, it seems that you should probably also have a server. Last night, I started build a collection of views (with an...

Check out the SWT site for some screen shots of many of the widgets included with SWT. Be sure to take a look at the snippets page for help on using ’em.

In my previous posting, I suggested that “scavenging, borrowing, and blatantly copy code” is the staple of modern software development; this is, of course, true. However, there are caveats to consider, both legal and technical. Legally, you need to be aware of the license that governs the code you’re copying...