Saturday, October 27, 2012

An Automated Tutorial

The EclipseCon Europe 2012 is over and it was, again, a pleasure to attend it. According to the excellent feedback I received my show in the theater has been a great success. I promised to upload the plugin that's been driving my Eclipse IDE automatically and make it available together with the slides. It's now available on the CDO homepage:


You can download the ZIP archive and unzip the contained plug-in JAR to the dropins/ folder of your Eclipse IDE. After restarting Eclipse you'll see this trim widget:


By clicking the yellow arrow button (or pressing the F5 key) repeatedly you can advance through the tutorial step by step and watch your workspace being updated until you end up with a fully functional distributed application system.

Lean back and enjoy...

6 comments:

  1. Thank for this great talk. What is also very interesting is how did you create the automated plugin for your tutorial ?

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  2. You're welcome!

    I programmed that presenter plug-in myself ;-)

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  3. I was literally about to create something like this this week for demonstrations while teaching classes. I checked into using cheat sheets and they didn't quite cut it.

    I've been using the snippets view to gradually build up examples while doing lectures. It's worked pretty well (and moves along faster than coding by hand during the lecture, which I used to do).

    Are you thinking of open-sourcing the plugin?
    -- Scott

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  4. Hi Scott,

    I have not decided, yet, whether I make this plugin available to the public. If so, I'll post a note here ;-)

    Cheers
    /Eike

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    1. Cool - thanks. Did you approach it generically, or is it pretty-well hard-wired for the presentations you did? (That's usually the biggest pain when I decide to make things available... that extra level of making it useful for more that exactly what I needed at the time...)

      Thanks, and keep up the great work!
      -- Scott

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    2. Hey, I'm a framework designer :P

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