Java Tutorials
- The Java Tutorials – must read for any java programmer. I still visit it quite often.
Eclipse Tutorials, Tools, Etc…
While the eclipse project is incredible, their tutorials are simply very bad… So I have/am/will continue searching for more material in the web. For now these sites have provided a lot of knowledge that I needed in a clear and easy to read way.
- Lars Vogel’s eclipse tutorials – which I have found easy to read, comprehensive and complete. He also has Java and Android tutorials which I have not read but if they are of the same level as his eclipse tutorials they are surely worth reading.
- The GEF wiki has a number of good resources, although most of them very high level:
- GEF description provides an understandable introduction to the GEF framework. The first part of the article is easy to understand but afterwards it starts to get into details with explanations but no examples
. - Paul B’s Eclipse Whiteboard has more good insights on the GEF framework. I found the EclipseCon 2008 tutorial given by Koen Aers very easy to follow as a starting point for learning GEF.
- The article The Draw2d Examples – A Hidden Treasure also provides good learning sources, although mostly by reading code.
- Another great GEF tutorial is provided by Psykokwak in french, but you can fetch an English translation of his tutorial in PDF format from here.
- Google CodePro Analytix, a static code analysis plugin for eclipse provided by Google. Very useful.
- Some GMF tutorials. Many are not updated but if you read them all you will get a rough idea on how to work with GMF:
- GMF Tutorials from the eclipse GMF site
- Good and simple tutorials by Jean-François Brazeau can be found here
- Jevon’s GMF tutorials
Modeling, UML, etc
- Great UML diagram reference by Kirill Fakhroutdinov
- MS Visio templates for UML modeling
- There are two open source projects that implement a UML editor on top of the eclipse platform: Topcased and Papyrus. After searching some time in the Topcased site for an owner of the project I saw that Papyrus is simply the next generation of Topcased, so I will only write about the later. Papyrus is an eclipse incubation project that is supported by list, the Lab of applied research in software-intensive technologies of cea, a french government-funded technological research organization and Atos, an “international information technology services company” based in France. It is a fairly active project, seems to have a good users guide and a developer guide (I just skimmed the site). But it seems a little funny to me that while they are creating a UML editor I could not find any UML documentation of the project
. The editor is based on GMF. I tried using the tool to create some sequence diagrams for my classes and private projects but the tools is not very user-friendly (for sequence diagrams. Maybe for other diagrams it is better). - A free (but not open source) UML editor is Visual Paradigm for UML, which has a “community edition” which is free for non-commercial use. This is the tool which I am using for all my UML modeling (well, most of it, since there are still things that only Visio can handle). I used it to create use cases, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, timing diagrams, and state machine diagrams. The commercial edition has many more features like code generation, database generations, reverse engineering and others, but since I don’t have the needs (nor the money) to buy the full version, I have not tested these features yet.
