Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Glimmer WIKI and FAQ

Glimmer's got pages on the Eclipse WIKI now:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Glimmer
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Glimmer/FAQ

They will be updated gradually as the project continues to grow.

6 comments:

Michael said...

Nice. It would be great to see a simple Eclipse plugin tutorial.

Michael said...

Andy,

Another idea is to set up a google group instead of Eclipse newsgroup and mailing lists. Google Groups are dead easy to join which may be a serious show stopper for newcomers.

What do you think?

Andy Maleh said...

Hi Michael.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll see if I can get a tutorial posted on how to integrate Glimmer with RCP.

Regarding the Eclipse newsgroup, could you please elaborate more on why it may be a serious show stopper for newcomers? Is the sign-up process too difficult compared to Google Groups' sign-up process? If so, in what way exactly?

Michael said...

Google Groups basically require no sign up: almost everyone nowadays got a Google account already. I personally have no problems with Eclipse mailing lists, but they cause some extra effort once in a while I never want to go through, and you cannot beat Google's search over groups and web access.

But it's just some wishful thinking. Another idea is to write a clean contribution guidelines document say at Eclipse wiki. I already did a clone with git-svn, and see a few places where we can make the code more Rubyish and test it better, but I am not sure if I should fall back to good old diff/patch scheme I haven't used since GitHub came around.

I have a use case for Glimmer and Eclipse-based tool, and I hope once it's done and useful I can release it as open source, but now I am just exploring what it would take to combine Glimmer and calling JRuby from Java as opposed to just going ahead and writing some Java code for both layout and Eclipse extensions. That said, I would love to contribute some tutorials or code myself, but I am not that experienced with Java/Ruby integration, SWT dvelopment and barely could get SWT windows working without Glimmer so far, with bare JRuby. There's always a learning curve.

Andy Maleh said...

Thanks a lot for your feedback and suggestions.

I created a GitHub repository for Glimmer, and I'm in the process of syncing it with the Eclipse SVN repository. Once I have that done, I'll blog about it. That will hopefully enable people to contribute much more easily by forking the project instead of having to submit patches. I'm looking forward to your code improvements that will result in more Rubyish code.

Feel free to post on the Glimmer newsgroup or send me emails whenever you need help on getting Glimmer working with Java code.

Patrick said...

I disagree with setting up a Google Groups for Glimmer. There are already two places (the blog and the eclipse news group) to discuss glimmer and adding a third will make it more confusing to newcomers on where they should ask questions.