Meet This Year's Top Ambassador Nominees

Tom Schindl

DZone: Could you tell us more about yourself?

Tom: It is a great honor being nominated. My name is Tom Schindl and I'm one of the founders of BestSolution.at Systemhaus GmbH, an innovative company located in Western Austria providing consulting services and business solutions on top of the Java platform ranging from Eclipse RCP to Web 2.0 applications developed with GWT.

DZone: What are the main things that you do within the community?
On a daily basis I answer questions on the newsgroup, helping people to get started with different Eclipse technologies that I'm familiar with:

• platform-rcp: ~210 posts
• platform-swt: ~490 posts
• platform-ui: ~330 posts
• platform-emf: ~160 posts
• technology-nebula: ~ 80 posts

Also, to help people get started more easily in future, I create snippets from the most frequently asked questions, compiling a JFace-Snippets collection.

In addition to answering newsgroup questions, I blog to describe my explorations of various Eclipse technologies as well as to highlight interesting Eclipse developments such as E4.

On a conference basis, I give talks at conferences like EclipseCon and Eclipse Summit Europe where I show what is available and how to wire it all together. For this purpose I create useful example applications that people can use to get started with the various technologies.

It's important to address the lack of documentation that is available because I have found that people often don't know what's already available; they simply need to see some code that wires everything together. One of those applications is the one I wrote for my Datacentric Application talk at ESE; many people use it to get started with CDO and EMF-Databinding and to present those technologies to their customers.

On a project basis I try to make Eclipse projects interesting for other developers ranging from Swing to GWT. That's why I started the UFaceKit project which provides Eclipse databinding observables for different UI platforms such as Swing, QT, and GWT. This can help projects like EMF (CDO, Teneo,...) to gain even more momentum outside of Eclipse development.

DZone: How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Tom:I started using Eclipse with version 3.1, started contributing with 3.2, and became a committer for platform UI with version 3.3. Since then I became a committer for Nebula, which I now co-lead with Chris Gross.

DZone: Do you have a favourite project within the Eclipse ecosystem?

Tom: Yes I have multiple projects that are all equally my favorite!

UFaceKit

Naturally I'm really proud of the UFaceKit project that I'm leading and the people that helped to make it happen. UFaceKit provides many interesting features starting from Declarative Styling(aka CSS) to support for different UI technologies (like QT).

Eclipse Databinding:

Helping Eclipse Databinding improve and become mainstream by working with passionate people like Boris Bokowski and Matt Hall is simply fun.

DZone: In the Eclipse world, what were your highlights of 2008, and what are you looking forward to in 2009?

Tom:First the best things about 2008.One of the coolest things this year was to learn about CDO and the solutions it provides for the applications I have to write in my day job. Besides providing me the possibility to transfer EMF-Objects over the wire without any interaction from my side, CDO provides me with a scalable solution when my model graphs become big and also solves many of the concurrency problems I face.

The best things about 2009 - E4,The next generation of the Eclipse Platform is a place where a lot innovation happens. Starting from the modeled workbench (the team I'm part of) to Declarative UI and a Flexible Resource Framework there are many different interesting things happening in e4. I decided to be part of e4 after EclipseCon 2008 and wrote the first EMF-based prototype for the Modeled Workbench. Being part of this effort is one of the greatest things! I think after EclipseCon 2009 the community is going to be amazed by the new design and the work that's been done by the e4 team.

With UFaceKit, I'm looking forward to shipping a first release of UFaceKit providing support for 4 different UI technologies: SWT, Swing, QT and GWT. I will include declarative styling (aka CSS) and declarative UI support using EMF. Hopefully it will attract new committers for other platforms such as Android and draw2d and even GEF3D and OpenGL to build a growing community around it.

DZone: What is your full time job?

Tom: My day job is leading a small software company which develops Java applications on top of the Eclipse technologies like RCP and EMF. We are also providing consulting services to introduce those Eclipse technologies in other companies and have lately started using GWT to provide Web 2.0 solutions and support for our customers.

DZone: Is it difficult for you to find the time to promote and support the Eclipse community?

Yes and no. Answering newsgroup questions is something like taking a small cigarette break every hour. The project and blogging work I do in the evening.

DZone:Why do you think you should be chosen as Top Ambassador?

I think I should be chosen because I have helped many people to get started with Eclipse technologies and provided them with high quality EPL source code they can use in their own products.
Ensuring that new developers have a positive experience when working with Eclipse and providing them with first class solutions so they can help their customers helps build on Eclipse's already excellent reputation.