So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some hacking while being on long airplane flights. Usually, I hack Eclipse-related things that somehow end up in milestone releases, but I figured I needed to enlighten myself with something new and refreshing.
For inspiration, I went and talked to an old college buddy of mine I trust. I happen to trust crazy people who preferred to do back-tracing solvers in PHP instead of LISP or C++ given a choice, but that’s another story (those were the days). This college buddy of mine ended up drinking the web 2.0 koolaid recently… he told me I should be writing Facebook applications (because Facebook is the greatest thing ever). He also called me an old fart for not writing Web 2.0 applications. Since I trust him and I don’t want to be an old fart, I took the bait and said OK, I’ll give this stuff a try at least.
So I went on my quest to write a facebook application and when I was going through the online documentation, I found that I could write a desktop-based facebook application. Furthermore, there were some Java APIs available. I thought to myself, Java… Desktop… I know that space pretty well… why not throw some Eclipse love in there? So within about 20 minutes of reading facebook documentation, I was on my way to writing an Eclipse-based facebook application.
As I was about to start coding, I thought to myself, why not do a blog series about this topic to help people better understand how to create Eclipse-based applications? Maybe it will be useful, may it won’t, but it should be fun! And to be honest, I also had some selfish goals. First, I needed something to kill the time on long airplane flights. Second, I want to be able to update my facebook status in Eclipse and to be able to poke other Eclipse committers like Dave Steinberg, Wassim Melhem and Kim Horne. Also, I didn’t like being called an old fart. So, if you’re interested, I’ll be posting things in parts as time passes and if people show interest. In the end, I want something that kind of looks likes this:
To start, continue reading on to creating An Eclipse-based Facebook Application (Part 1).