Right after the Eclipse Con Europe the Eclipse Day Paris takes place tomorrow. As its name indicates this is a one day meeting for the French Eclipse community in Paris. It brings together technological and industrial actors of the Eclipse ecosystem. We will be there to present Eclipse Scout.

In Paris we are going to presentat a talk on Eclipse Scout, giving an overview of the possibilities of the framework. Les possibilités d’Eclipse Scout

During our presentation we will use “Eclipse for Scout developers” to develop the first window of a client server application that manages multiple-choices questions. At the end of the talk, we will give a preview of two features coming next year with the Juno release.

See you tomorrow in Paris

Jérémie and Andy

Eclipse Scout in Ludwigsburg

In our workshop at the ECE 11 we help you to build your first Scout applications. This includes the mandatory “Hello World” app, followed by a slightly more complex example with database access. If things go well we have prepared the material to build the following:

If you ‘d like to attend, come see us at our booth #4 and we help you to do the necessary setup. Remark: A linkedIn account with a couple of connections is helpful to build the application shown above (if asked politely Wayne and Mike might accept your connection requests…).

Bring something back from Eclipse Con Europe

While you’re having fun at the ECE 11 consider bringing back something for your kids etc. as well. For this purpose the Eclipse Scout team has organised the Scout Sheep

See us at booth #4 and get your’s

Eclipse Scout in Ludwigsburg

The Eclipse Scout team is looking forward to Ludwigsburg next week and are in the middle of preparing our talks and material to bring

In our first talk we will hightlight our favorite GUI element, the “Smartfield” even in the light of some bad comments behind the scenes regarding the naming of this field we quite like it. Why? Because it allows to build user interfaces with an excellent usability that look good at the same time.

Bad Dropdown Lists

We all know various implementations of drop-down lists, combo-boxes, etc. They all work well if the user has to pick an element out of a handful of choices. If we need to pick a value out of hundrets or thousands of elements, the results often fail to please.

In our opinion all examples above (MS Outlook, Firefox) will not make users happy

• Additional Dialogs to pick a value for a specific purpose should not involve an additional dialog on top
• Forcing the user to know/remember the initial letters of the entry creates unnecessary pain
• Painting the list as long as possible doesn’t solve the problem

Better Solutions

“Search as you type”, the use of wildcards in the input field, and updating suggestions dynamically goes a long way toward improving the usability of the software. Examples below are Eclipse IDE, Google, Lotus Notes 8.x (using LN7.x puts you into the bad example section).

The Scout Smartfield

In the domain of Scout applications the Smartfield is always our first choice. It features:

• Search as you type
• Wildcard support
• Dynamic update of hit list
• Supports both flat list input as well as hierachical lists
• No need for an additional dialog / result table element just to select a value

If would like to learn more and happen to attend the ECE come to our talk , or meet us at our Booth #4 have a chat and get your Scout Sheep …

We recently created some new HowTo’s to help you creating scout applications. They are about:

• Creating views
• Creating standalone client applications
• Exchanging default images.

Some of them contain demo projects which you can download and import in your eclipse workspace to make it even easier to learn scout.

For example, changing default icons allows you to do the following:

Check out the wiki to see all of the HowTo’s. If you are new to scout you may want to have a look at the tutorial section first:

Please let us know if they helped you and what other topics you like to have covered (using the Scout forum).

We are organizing our first Eclipse Stammtisch in Zürich and are happy to feature interesting topics and great speakers. The details of the program may be found here.

At a quick glance:

• Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS): Ralph Müller
• Eclipse Scout: Andreas Hoegger + Matthias Zimmermann
• Jubula: Hans-J. Brede
• Git, Gerrit, Hudson and Mylyn: Benjamin Muskalla
• RT/RAP: Holger Staudacher
• Code Recommenders: Marcel Bruch

We are looking forward to see you in Zurich! October 13th @ 18:00 at the Technopark in Zürich

June 22nd will be the great day: Eclipse Scout will be part of Indigo Release Train – first time for us One day before, on June 21st, we will give a talk on building business applications with Eclipse Scout at Democamp Darmstadt. In our talk you will learn how to develop and deploy business critical software applications with our framework.

Let’s connect with a fresh poured cold beer

In the context of the “Indigo” release, Scout logging has converged to a “local minimum”
that suffices the simple, stable, flexible criteria. Check this thead for some history.

As a result, we’ve written up the current state in the Scout wiki covering the following topics:

• Setup and selection of JUL or the Eclipse Logging Framework (simple + stable)
• Usage of custom logging on the example of log4j (flexible)
• Some additional features for log recording (flexible)
• Differnt logging setups for development and production (flexible)

Today at 9:00 am PST / 12:00 pm EST / 4:00 pm UTC / 6:00 pm CET we’ll provide some Scout project background and demonstrate the building of a small Scout client-server application as shown below.

If you’re interested head for live.eclipse.org and register for todays Eclipse Scout webinar.

If you’d like to download the Scout package prior to the webinar you may do so via the Indigo downloads (developer page):

… and after scrolling down a bit …