What are my thoughts? Well, besides the quirks of reverse-specing something… it seems like a good idea. However, I’m still a bit uneasy with where the control lies… does this specification imply that the OSGi community gets to dictate what is in eRCP from now on? What impact does this have on the RCP stack controlled by the Eclipse community? Does the eRCP project in Eclipse become the reference implementation, similar to how Equinox is the reference implementation for OSGi?

Cool stuff… it’s amazing to see the excitement around OSGi and eRCP these days!

• Directly after the Titan long talk
• During the IBM Developer Day reception
• During the Titan poster session

If you have some spare time on your hands, you can craft an eRCP application pretty easily if you have any experience with RCP. Here are some resources to help get you started:

• My eRCP article
• Another eRCP article
• eRCP Sudoku example in CVS (org.eclipse.ercp.sudoku*)
• eRCP Helloworld in CVS

By the way, I’d look for an official press release soon for the details, but what’s wrong with getting started a bit early ?

What’s that we see in red? Oh my, it’s eRCP, what’s that doing there! People always called me crazy when I told them Eclipse would find its way into your cell phone or PDA, but look, another phone! In Sprint’s case, it looks like the ease of application development, shared services and the ability to do some cool remote management swayed the business case for including OSGi and eRCP within Sprint phones.

On a side note, this is what I have:

That’s an ‘Eclipse Installed’ sticker on my Blackberry. I tend to take the approach if I keep saying something, it will eventually just be true (I heard that works well in politics). Are you listening RIM? I know you’re a gold sponsor at EclipseCon, your tooling is built on Eclipse… the next logical step is Eclipse in your phone. I think you should hurry up because the rumor on the street is that Fake Steve Jobs will announce Eclipse on the iPhone at EclipseCon

• Plug-in Development 101: The Fundamentals
• Plug-in Development 201: Rich Client Applications

Being on the EclipseCon Program Committee, I’m going to do my best to try something new this year with the tutorial order. I’m thinking that the introductory Plug-in Development tutorials done by the PDE team should take place in the morning. In the afternoon, there will be a tutorial on eRCP followed by one on RAP. This effectively would allow a tutorial attendee to get a taste of three different runtime environments that Eclipse targets:

• Desktop (RCP)
• Embedded (eRCP)
• Server (RAP)

Where else can you do that? This also traces the evolution of Eclipse from just being some tooling platform to a viable runtime for various types of applications. It’s my hope that the tutorial attendees who went through this track of tutorials would come away that Eclipse isn’t just about tools anymore and that there’s a lot of power in reusing your skills and assets to develop against three different runtime environments. All of this in just one day!

Do people think this is a good idea? If so, I’ll see what I can do to make it happen.

Oh, and please submit something to EclipseCon if you haven’t already

Oh, there are some new Eclipse articles out. The first is pretty snazzy article on eJFace which is part of the eRCP project. It’s like JFace, but for more constrained environments. The other article is a simple introduction I did for Eclipse Forms to help spread the word.

The next stop on the article train for me is a two-part article series with Benjamin Muskalla about the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). The first part will be a basic introduction to RAP including some demos, setting up your environment for development and a simple example to work with. The second part will include more advanced topics like theming and creating your own widgets for use within RAP. Look for these articles in a couple weeks to coincide with the launch of RAP!

On a side note, I noticed the RAP team posted the famous RCP Mail example as an online demo.

Hopefully the EMF team investigates this possibility after the Europa release, it’ll be a cool thing to watch.

If anyone has a direct link to an article, that would be great!