50 minutes towards a better you

Darin Swanson (IBM), David Green (Tasktop), Steffen Pingel (Tasktop)

Eclipse Ecosystem - Committer And Contributor · Long - curated
Thursday, 13:30, 50 minutes | Grand Ballroom B

Darin Swanson

David Green

Steffen Pingel

WikiText: Generate Eclipse Help from Eclipsepedia

You have an abundance of help content online evolving with healthy collaborative contributions in a way that can only occur on a wiki. How do you package this content in the Eclipse Help System? You can have your wiki cake and eat it too when you discover how the Mylyn project has created a repeatable process for converting wiki content into Eclipse Help. After attending this session you will be well-equipped to adopt such a process for your plug-in, so that you can continue to enjoy the benefits of wiki-based content while providing the same help content offline from within Eclipse.

This session will provide an overview of the process of converting Eclipsepedia content to Eclipse Help using WikiText, and then dive into the technical detail of how it works on a real project. Attendees will get an in-depth view of the Ant script that drives the process and a good understanding of how the components fit together. Pitfalls and guidelines in authoring good Eclipsepedia content will be covered, as well as safeguards to detect and prevent problem content.

Mylyn Connector Crash Course

In the past few years the Eclipse Mylyn project has seen massive growth in both user and ISV adoption. Availability of high quality task repository connectors has helped perpetuate Mylyn's success. However, many communities and companies that have expressed interest in Mylyn integration do not yet have access to a Mylyn connector. In this short talk, attendees will get a crash course in Mylyn connector implementation.

The talk will begin with a quick overview of the core APIs, their roles and design rationale. This is followed by a rundown of the ingredients of Mylyn connector construction from retrieving your first task, forming queries, and leveraging the generic attribute architecture to provide rich offline editing and change notifications. By the end of the talk attendees will have learned how to use the key extension points and extend required classes for building a task repository connector.

Darin Swanson is one of the original committers on the Eclipse project, working as the Ant Component lead for the Eclipse Platform Project and as a key committer for the Eclipse debug support. He did a tour of duty on the Eclipse Board of Directors as a Committer Representative for 2007. Darin has presented numerous Eclipse tutorials and talks at several conferences and has helped organize and participated in numerous code camps. He actively fields questions in the Eclipse newsgroups and has been nominated as a top committer. He has also been active in other open source arenas having participated in mailing list discussions, reported bugs and supplied patches to the CruiseControl and Apache Ant projects. Darin is currently heavily involved in the Jazz project working on the Process team. His blog which includes entries on coding and running can be found here.

David Green is a software developer at MAKE Technologies creating developer tools based on Java and the Eclipse platform. David is primarily interested in MDD and MDE development techniques and how they can be effectively applied to the legacy modernization problem. David is the creator of WikiText, Mylyn's new wiki markup framework. WikiText enables Mylyn and other Eclipse applications to consume and display lightweight markup in multiple markup languages. David has recently become a committer on the Mylyn project and has been developing Eclipse plug-ins since early 2004. David regularly recounts his experiences on his technical blog http://greensopinion.blogspot.com

Steffen Pingel is a software developer at Tasktop Technologies. When he is not riding his bike in the beautiful mountains surrounding Vancouver he enjoys working on Mylyn-based tools that keep developers focused and productive. He became a committer on the project in 2006 while completing his degree in Software Engineering at the University of Stuttgart. Steffen is fascinated by the quality and extensibility of the Eclipse platform which keeps inspiring him to improve the Mylyn framework.