The first thing I asked about “20 Things” was for the pop culture source of the title. Apparently (according to McQ), there is none.
The first thing that I noticed about “20 Things” was that there are only 17 things on the list (at least there were only 17 when we started).
The first thing that I thought about “20 Things” was that the list provides a good path for introduction to important Eclipse topics. “20 Things” is the list of ~20 things that people building applications on the Eclipse platform need to think about. AFAIK, the fact that—at least the first few of them—are in the order that I introduce them to people.
If you’re just learning to build Eclipse plug-ins, the first thing you need to know is how to build a simple view. The PDE provides a lot of help in this regard. Once you’ve got that view that’s more-or-less independent of everything else in the workbench, probably the next thing you need to think about is the selection service. Shortly thereafter, you’ll need to look into the adapter framework ([1], [2], [3]). Not long after that, you’ll need to think about jobs, help, preferences, etc. Like I said, the list is pretty much in order. At least the first eight or so.
Of course, not every plug-in (or application) has views or a GUI of any sort. So, it’s probably more accurate to say that this list of ~20 things contains those sorts of things that developers building GUI applications based on Eclipse technology should care about. But even for that group of developers building headless plug-ins and applications, there’s still a lot of value on that list.
I’ve uploaded some pictures from the E4 Summit to Flickr.
