I Want My DTPtv...

Hi again...

So one of my presentations at EclipseCon 2009 was "DTPtv and Other Wacky Ideas."

Was this truly a wacky idea? Probably. Who would have thought to merge Eclipse, YouTube, and DTP in one go?

My goal was two-fold... First, I wanted to show that DTP can be used for something more than just databases. Far too often we're pidgeonholed as a provider of database tools. And though we do that, we do much more as well. Second, I wanted to do something out of the usual box, and YouTube is pretty dang far out of the box...

Basically I focused on three different things...

1. Make the YouTube APIs accessible and test them.
2. Create a YouTube Search connection profile in DTP so you could create and manage multiple searches in a variety of ways.
3. Create a viewer that would allow a user to take advantage of YouTube searches on the fly and see the results within the Eclipse IDE or in an RCP application.

Now why would you want to do this you might ask? Good question.

Image via CrunchBase

Let's say you write Eclipse RCP applications for a company with a healthy education department. They want to help out beginning users by recording tutorials and putting them up on YouTube. Not only will it help your users, but it works as a bit of helpful marketing for your sales staff. And now that they're doing this, they want a way to be able to take advantage of these YouTube videos right inside the application.

Maybe this isn't so far fetched after all?

In the next series of blog posts, I'll focus on the three steps I took to get this all working. I demoed working code at the conference and will clean it up a little, zip it up, and have it available on a file sharing site soon. I hope to also contribute it back to the Examples project at Eclipse, as it crosses project boundaries.

As always, please feel free to ask questions or make comments as I go through the process. Many of you will find this old hat, but I'm hoping someone can take advantage of the information. :)

Thanks!
--Fitz

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• EclipseCon 2009 Post-mortem (fitzdtp.blogspot.com)