Getting ready for my short-talk at EclipseCon 2008

Happy New Year 2008 to everyone. This is my first blog in 2008. Last year ended with some sadness as i lost my backpack containing laptop, camera and some other important belongings in New York airport. I could not trace it till date and i my hopes have been diminishing. It took a little while for me to get a new laptop, prepare it for the daily routine.

Past 1.5 year i have been concentrating on tweaking, customizing and writing plugins for the Web 2.0 frameworks. I was quite successful in providing a good IDE to the IT developers with a good set of code generation features. Thanks to WTP, EMF, Eclipse DnD and in the end Eclipse Platform. In the meantime, i have also encountered with the basic question of “Can Eclipse UI be similar to other widget frameworks out there in Web 2.0 space ?“. I was haunted with this question all the time and probably in Oct 2007, i was ready for an answer. While its not possible to expect a very similar UI in eclipse as in GWT, Dojo, Rico, Zimbra, Flash, etc… , it’s definitely possible to get some-what-close look as in Web 2.0 kind of applications.

I am sharing all my experiences to make an eclipse application to give a look of Web 2.0 application. I thank SWT, JFace  and Nebula to provide such versatile framework. I hope this short-talk would help many of us to have some dangling ideas about how to achieve a “Web 2.0 style widgets and look”.

I am very excited to see you all at eclipse and share my experiences. I would love to see and chat with my previous colleagues Stephan Eberle, Frank Gerhardt, Elias Volanakis and many others.