I'll soon be on my way to San Jose to present my experiences with Eclipse RCP development at EclipseCon 2008. The conference will be running from March 17th to March 20th.
In the 2-hour tutorial "Test-Driven Development (TDD) for Eclipse RCP" Nick Malnick, a fellow Obtivian, and I will be demonstrating practical techniques and tools for TDD'ing Eclipse RCP applications.
Yes, there are plenty of unit tests in the core Eclipse code-base. And, many teams developing applications on top of the Eclipse RCP platform are writing unit tests. But, very few true test-first development takes place in the Eclipse RCP community. People want to test-first—but the Eclipse code-base and architecture are simply not test-friendly.
Need an example? Try mocking out an SWT control using JMock or MockObjects. These are commonly used libraries in Java test-first development and totally unavailable to Eclipse RCP developers.
But, by putting the right tools in place, such as using the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern and PDEUnit, true test-first development is within reach and, yes, practical.
Red, Green, Refactor.
My long talk at EclipseCon 2008, "Creating Enterprise Business Applications Using Eclipse RCP", was originally presented with Scott Delap at EclipseCon 2007 as a tutorial. I'll be pairing down the material into a 1 hour format this time around, which should make it more focused.
"Creating Enterprise Business Applications Using Eclipse RCP" is a case study extracted from my experiences with a large (multi-million line, multi-year) enterprise Eclipse RCP project. The project goal was to build a CRM/Sales-Force Automation application that would eventually be deployed to as many as 40,000 users. The users had to have both connected and disconnected functionality, which required a local data store. When connected, the users needed the ability to sync up with the mother ship, or home office, of the client company. Finally, the business application was a shrink-wrapped flagship product for the client company and it needed to be branded, have a friendly installer, allow updating over the Net, and look good!
Fortunately, Eclipse RCP turned out to be a great platform for developing this rich client business application both because it allowed powerful UI paradigms but also because it was highly responsive when users engaged in extended periods of data entry. The downsides? Well, let's just say that there were some interesting ones. Come to the presentation in March to get all the details.
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