EclipseZone's Top 10 Articles of 2008

6 - Glimmer - Using Ruby to Build SWT User Interfaces

Glimmer is currently in the incubation phase in Eclipse.org. When I read about it, I asked Andy Maleh if he would mind writing an introduction to the project for EclipseZone. It shows how much power there is available to us if we use DSLs. Glimmer is a JRuby DSL that makes it really easy to developer user interfaces in SWT, and follows one of the key design principles : convention over configuration. I expect to hear a lot more about this project in 2009.  I know that Andy will be doing at talk on Simplifying Desktop Development with Glimmer at EclipseCon 2009

7 - Eclipse Ganymede - 18 Million Lines of Code Delivered on Schedule

The title of this article says it all, and shows the scale of the annual releases in Eclipse. 18 Million Lines of Code! And on time. I'm not sure if any of the larger scale industrial projects ever manage to hit their schedule like the open source efforts at Eclipse have managed. I think we can all learn if we follow the Eclipse Way. If I find the person who knows the secret to this success I'll be sure to get them to write us an article about it!

 

8 - Effective Eclipse: Custom Templates 

Tomas' second entry in the top 10 covers the use of templates in Eclipse. I've found these useful to avoid having to do overly repetitive coding tasks (if I do something more than once over the course of a day, it's probably worth having in a template). It's another useful tip to getting the most out of your IDE and boosting productivity.

9 - Tips and Tricks for Debugging in Eclipse

Tips on how to use the IDE seem to be quite popular on EZ. This article covers how to use the debugged efficiently in Eclipse and how to do thing like writing your own formatter to get better details for your breakpoints. Trust me, you might thing you know how to debug well, but this will help you do it better!

10 - Scripting Eclipse with the Monkey Project: An Introduction 

Eclipse Monkey is an intruiging project. It allows you to script parts of your IDE by writing simple JavaScript. DOMs are provided to give you access to editors, resources and views in the workbench. If you haven't heard about this project yet, you'll get a great introduction here. 2009 should see the continuation of the rise of scripting.

That completes the top 10 most read articles of 2008. I'm interested to hear the EclipseZone articles that you would rate highly from the last year and why. That way we can continue to improve the quality of our articles on EclipseZone for 2009.