A few weeks ago I gave a quick demo of the new RESTful capabilities of the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) at the Eclipse Helios DemoCamp in Budapest.
Screenshot of the unofficial StackExchange Eclipse client plug-in
I created a small Eclipse plugin, which contributed a view and a preference page to the UI and utilized the public REST API of StackOverflow.com to retrieve various bits of user data, including a Gravatar image. Since my time was limited, I couldn’t put all the fancy features in it which I initially planned, for example regular polling of user data, notification bubbles, etc.
Actually, I was somewhat surprised, that there is no built-in support for notifications in Eclipse, but allegedly the Mylyn implementation will be migrated to the main Eclipse Platform code base sometime in the future. However, there is a short and sweet example of how to implement a notification popup widget from scratch,which I plan to use for this pet project.
Since the RESTful client capabilities of ECF are quite new I struggled a bit with learning how to do things, but I managed to get the hang of it by dissecting the relevant JUnit tests. I might have gotten some things wrong, or just not so pretty, but it worked for the demo. I created an Eclipse Labs project to host the code, and I will continue to work on it in my spare time. Hopefully this example code will help someone to learn the ropes of ECF Remote Services, and maybe eventually people might even want to use it to stay connected to StackOverflow.com even in their IDE.
