The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse at EclipseCon 2013

Jason and I are at EclipseCon in Boston this week to discuss what we’ve learned developing the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse over the last three years. Our session is chock full of advice for how to develop great Eclipse plug-ins, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at how we build the Toolkit. Here’s what we plan to cover:

Learn best practices for Eclipse plug-in development that took us years to figure out!

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse brings the AWS cloud to the Eclipse workbench, allowing developers to develop, debug, and deploy Java applications on the AWS platform. For three years, we’ve worked to integrate AWS services into your Eclipse development workflow. We started with a small seed of functionality for managing EC2 instances, and today support nine services and counting. We learned a lot on the way, and we’d like to share!

The Toolkit touches a wide array of Eclipse technologies and frameworks, from the Web Tools Platform to the Common Navigator Framework. By now we’ve explored so much of the Eclipse platform that we’ve started to become embarrassed by the parts of the Toolkit that we wrote first. If only someone had told us the right way to do things in the first place! Instead, we had to learn the hard way how to make our code robust, our user interfaces reliable and operating-system independent (not to mention pretty).

We’re here to teach from our experience, to share all the things we wish someone had told us before we learned it the hard way. These are the pointers that will save you hours of frustration and help you deliver a better product to your customers. They’re the tips we would send back in time to tell our younger selves. We’ll show you how we used them to make the Toolkit better and how to incorporate them into your own product.

Topics include getting the most out of SWT layouts, using data binding to give great visual feedback in wizards, managing releases and updates, design patterns for resource sharing, and much more.

If you are attending the conference, come by to say hello and get all your questions about the Toolkit answered! We are also handing out $100 AWS credits to help you get started using AWS services without a financial commitment, so come talk to us and we’ll hook you up.