Meeting the Natives at Eclipsecon

Welcome to a corner of Eclipse RCP culture, my name is Jody Garnett and I have the pleasure of hacking away at project called uDig (i.e. User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS).

The uDig application is almost a year old now, and is rapidly approaching its second major release.  The uDig project actually started (with a bit of help from the GeoConnections program) almost two years ago (wow what a ride). We took a number of risks on the uDig project and many of them pay off. Going with Eclipse RCP was one such risk.

And this year we will be at EclipseCon

Specifically a core member of community, Richard Gould, will be in attendance.

Richard will be located the "Open Source Pavilion" and will no doubt have some cool new uDig 1.1 features(flash) to show you.  Please stop by and say hi to Richard, he won't have free beer tickets or anything, but you can quickly put together some amazing maps from free data, published with open standards.

By way of introduction to Richard let me hook up you with his most popular piece of writing:

• Adding History to Dialogs and Wizards

Now this was hard to figure out two years ago, now there are lots of nice Eclipse books. Still it hard to figure this kind of thing out the first (and even second time) you do it. And this is still one of the most popular pages in the uDig Developers guide.

Even two years on we are answering RCP questions like:

• How do I configure keyboard shortcuts?
• How should I use a Progress Monitor?
• How to wait in the display thread?
• What is this file for?

uDig as more then a GIS

One thing we do have a bit of fun explaining about uDig is that it actually functions as a "GIS Platform" from which you can build your own custom mapping application (without all the usual complicated GIS stuff like "layers"). Our developers list is alive with a great set of people from around the world taking on all manner of interesting activities.

For uDig 1.1 you can even embed the GISPlatform into your Eclipse RCP project.

Here are a couple of examples of uDig based applications:

• OGC OWS-3 GeoDSS Client: we had the please to produce one of these "targeted" GIS system based on uDig through are involvement in with the Open Geospatial Consortium Open Web Services Phase 3 Initiative. Off all the people represented there we are the one you can download.  And you should check out the very interesting movie they made, with thick client wiki collaboration , geovideo, web service chaining and more.
• http://www.opengeospatial.org/demo/ows3/
• press release
• Populations at Risk:  an interesting little project prototyping relief work.
•  screen snapshot

I will try and post some more examples as ask permission on the mailing list.

uDig as a Community

One of the things I am most excited about is the uDig community subversion space, we invite those working on uDig plugins (from Peru to Finland so far) to take make use of the same repository we use for uDig development.

And here is the best part: we package up these community plugins onto the uDig download site.

This is exactly how I like to see open source projects function, with the architecture supporting community involvement. You can download the latest uDig release, and through a quick trip to the update manager check out what the community is doing.

Although this is not a technical benefit, it is easily the one of the strongest arguments to make your next open source project an Eclipse open source project. (Yes I know that the plug-in system is actually from OSGi, but until their is a J2EE profile I am not sure anyone will notice).