Dwight Deugo and I have been relatively quietly pounding away on a new “Eclipse IDE for Education” component in the SOC project (though I did blog about this a few posts back). The idea is to try and reduce some of the complexity faced by first time users of Eclipse who are in the process of being overwhelmed with classwork.
So far, most of the work has been on just getting things started. First, Dwight created the “JavaLite” environment which includes a new perspective, new view, and a couple of wizards that streamline the development process a bit. I’ve been spending a lot of time (too much, really) getting those pieces that we do have to build into a coherent update site and a downloadable package. In the process, I’ve come up with a few ideas about a common build infrastructure, but that’s a story for later…
I’ve been testing the Windows and Linux versions. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a Mac, so I can only hope that I didn’t screw that package up. Here’s a screen shot.
I think that we’ve managed a reasonable first cut, but there’s a lot more to do. For starters, I don’t like the name “JavaLite” (sorry Dwight); I prefer something more along the lines of “Assignment Explorer” (but I’m still not happy with that). Your comments are welcome on bug 244644. I’m also convinced that we can do more than just strip down the existing wizards; I think there’s a better paradigm and am looking forward to experimenting with this a bit. In the meantime, I’ve opened a bunch of other feature requests and bugs if you’re looking for something to do…
Dwight’s going to unleash this on his unsuspecting first-year students this term (he’s a professor at Carleton University). We’re going to carefully monitor their use of the environment and drive their feedback into evolving the IDE.
More information about the component, including download instructions are available on the component’s wiki page.
