I’ll be honest with you: I’m not sure what “World Tour” means. At present, I’m planning this “Europa” tutorial for EclipseWorld, being held November 6-8, 2007 in Reston, Virginia.
Since I started off with honesty, I may as well continue with it: I’ve been struggling to decide what constitutes a “Europa” tutorial. For the uninitiated, “Europa” is the name we gave to our 2007 release train (the simultaneous release of 21 Eclipse projects). With twenty-one projects involved, you’d think it’d be easy to develop a day of material. And you’d be right. I want, however, the tutorial to capture the essence of Europa. It’d be relatively easy to just throw together a bunch of slides about some of the projects and do some exercises involving the technology. To some extent, I’m going to do that.
I’m planning to start by discussing what Eclipse means to me. I give this sort of talk pretty often, and I think it adds a lot of value. It’s certainly the case that—every time I present it—I tell everybody something that they didn’t know. I think it sets the stage for a discussion of just what the heck Europa is. I’m going to talk about the value of the release train and describe each of the projects (briefly, there’s only so much territory that can be covered in a day). I intend to spend some time talking about how projects get involved in the release train and the obligations that come along with participation. I intend to talk a little about the IP due diligence process at Eclipse and how it relates to Europa.
I have a couple of exercises planned. I’ll expose attendees to some of the new features in Eclipse 3.3. Mylyn is going to be part of it. My main focus, however, will be about using Eclipse technology as a basis for building applications. We’ll spend a little time going through some RCP/Equinox stuff and take a look at how some of the projects you may not hear that much about can really help. I have opted to not include EPP as part of this run of the tutorial.
