Great Things Happening at Eclipse Zone

Tomas Kramar's Effective Eclipse series has gotten a lot of attention over the past few weeks on EclipseZone. The aim of the series is simple - to educate, or re-educate, Eclipse IDE users to help them be more productive. Let's recap the series so far.

Part 1 - Setup Your Environment
The first part of the series outlines getting started with Eclipse and how to assign the right amount of memory for Eclipse to run. It also covers different preferences you can set from font size to line numbers.

Part 2 - Shortcut Keys
The series continues as Tomas provides a long list of different shortcuts that exist in Eclipse to help you work faster. Most developers prefer keyboard shortcuts to mouse clicks. In this article you'll see the default shortcuts available and how to create your own key bindings - with some interesting suggestions.

Part 3 - Don't Write the Code, Generate It
In Part 3, Tomas discusses how code gets generated in Eclipse using the Template functionality. You can create you own templates for common methods and constructs that you use in projects.

Part 4 - Custom Templates
This part builds on the Part 3 to show you how to use the template editor and includes some extremely useful example templates from Tomas.

After reading through these articles and using some of the tips,
you'll find yourself a much more effective developer, with more time to focus on the solutions, and less time worrying about typos and repetitive coding tasks.

Community
There's a big focus on community as we get closer to EclipseCon.
Registration is still available for the conference in Santa Clara,
California. There's a diverse and interesting agenda for the
conference - we'll have more news on that as we get closer to the
time.

An RCP Training Series and the Tower of Babel
The Eclipse Foundation is starting up a series of RCP training courses across a wide variety of countries in early summer.
There's also a call to action for the Babel project - the more help that's given to this project the better, as it means Eclipse can become truly international.

While on the subject of the community, please visit the Eclipse Zone forums to engage in discussions, and help people out. If you've got any ideas for articles and technologies you'd
like to see covered, it's a good place to put them up and we'll find
the writers.

Until Next Time,
James Sugrue
EZ Zone Leader
james.sugrue@gmail.com