Greetings to our authors!

Let's all give a big JavaRanch howdy to our guest authors, Kent Beck and Erich Gamma who are here to talk about their new book Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins.
If Erich Gamma's name is familiar to you that is because he is one of the Gang of Four who wrote the classic book, Design Patterns. Kent Beck is, of course, the author of several books dealing with XP.
We will be giving away copies of their new book to four lucky winners. Check the Book Promotion Page for eligibility requirements.

Welcome to both!

Welcome Kent and Erich!
Thanks Kent for his another contribution(after his last year's great contribution - Test Driven Development).

Yaaaa, Whoo whoo, [stomp stomp stomp].
Great book BTW.

[ November 11, 2003: Message edited by: Jon Strayer ]
[ November 11, 2003: Message edited by: Jon Strayer ]

Welcome!

Great big Hiya to you both...

Geez, Tom, why can't you ever get us any authors here that people have actually heard of?

Welcom, Kent and Erich!

Welcome Kent and Erich. I want to say what a great honor it is for us to have you guys here. Your written books have helped me alot with how I design and develop software. It opened me up to a huge new world.

Thanks and enjoy your stay.
Mark

Hello!
A question to the authors - but first the background.
I am looking at using Eclipse not for IDE development (though I have done some of that) but as the base for a more standard client application.
The drivers for me are the modular approach of plugins and (I am hoping!) easy distributed maintenance through its remote update features.
Now I know that the Eclipse 3.0 development is going through the pain of seperating the core framework from its IDE roots to allow just this. (Shame on me - I have not had time to follow the 'M' releases to see exacly how far they have got).
Will this change significantly affect plug-in development. Or more pertinently for the authors, should I wait for edition 2 ("Now including Eclipse 3") of their book?

With thanks - and much appreciation that there is finally an Eclipse reference!
Mike E.

Originally posted by Mike Evans:
Hello!
A question to the authors - ...

Mike, welcome to JavaRanch and thanks for participating in the promotion. As the "welcome" thread in a promotion generally doesn't count towards the giveaway, and since each thread should have its own distict topic, I highly recommend creating a new thread and posting your question there.

Originally posted by Mark Spritzler:
I want to say what a great honor it is for us to have you guys here. Your written books have helped me alot with how I design and develop software. It opened me up to a huge new world.

I have exactly the same feeling with Mark.
After greetings, my first question to our authors would be, what motivate you two masters of software development to write such a book - on Eclipse?
Thanks.

Should you read the book now? Yes, definitely. There is a lot to learn about Eclipse. If you get started now, you'll be ready to figure out the 3.0 stuff when it appears. Some details will change, the basic concepts will be the same.
Kent

I wrote the book because:
* I like collaborating with Erich.
* Eclipse is hot new technology and well designed. Eclipse allowed me to control my own environment once I learned to write plug-ins.
* The book gave me an excuse to program.
* There was no book that was the resource I wanted. Now there is :-)
Kent

Originally posted by Jason Menard
Mike, welcome to JavaRanch...

Thanks Jason, and apologies for my breaking etiquette.
Alas I have my answer from Kent now, so I have no reason to start a new thread.
I'll try blatant plugs for the book elsewhere in this forum as my attempt to win a free copy ...
Mike E.

I am looking at using Eclipse not for IDE development (though I have done some of that) but as the base for a more standard client application.
The drivers for me are the modular approach of plugins and (I am hoping!) easy distributed maintenance through its remote update features.
Now I know that the Eclipse 3.0 development is going through the pain of seperating the core framework from its IDE roots to allow just this. (Shame on me - I have not had time to follow the 'M' releases to see exacly how far they have got).

The generic workbench will make its first appearance in M5 which will be out Nov 21.
Ed Burnette has already made an example available at: http://www.eclipsepowered.org/RCP/

Will this change significantly affect plug-in development.

the plug-in development story will be the same, you can now just use plug-ins for general application development. The API breakage is minimal (some packages got moved, and some methods got replaced). We have converted last week and the migration is smooth.

Or more pertinently for the authors, should I wait for edition 2 ("Now including Eclipse 3") of their book?

I wouldn't wait with starting contributing to Eclipse until version 3... you want to start NOW!

oops, just noticed that I didn't give you my answer on this question:

...my first question to our authors would be, what motivate you two masters of software development to write such a book - on Eclipse?

I wrote the book because:
* by now everybody knows that Eclipse can be used as a Java IDE, but Eclipse is more than that. It is a general platform for building all kinds of things. Eclipse is fun to extend and therefore I wanted share this with others with a book that focusses on writing plug-ins.
* I knew that writing a book will be intense, so I wanted to make this book fun for me as well. Working with Kent is fun and I always learn something when I program with him. I was more than happy that he accepted my invite to work on this book with me.
* This book was an opportunity to capture things I've learnt and worked on during the last ten years (design patterns, JUnit, tools, exploring large oo-systems).
--erich