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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Data Tools at EclipseCon 2009

Hey all!

Yes, the holidays are almost upon us... But even better than that, EclipseCon 2009 is just around the corner! (Ok, maybe not RIGHT around the corner, but three months will zip by in no time.)

This year in the Data Tools track we have a tutorial coming up and bunch of cool talks from a number of different directions.

Though I'm helping with the tutorial this year and moderating a block of short talks, I also am talking about how to use DTP to connect to something other than a database. After all, not all data is in databases!

My long talk this year will show how DTP and the Data Source Explorer can be used for searching and viewing YouTube videos in Eclipse. How do these two worlds meet? Come to my talk and find out!

Besides that, I get to moderate a set of three cool short talks. These bright folks will talk about how DTP is being used in RCP as a database developer's type of tool, what's going on with the SQL Query Builder in Galileo, and how DTP is being used in cool ways by a commercial application.

So be sure to check out some of our talks this year! In another post, I'll talk some about what to expect from our tutorial and some of the other cool talks going on at EC2009 that I'm excited about!

Register today and don't forget to reserve a room at the hotel (it fills up fast!)!

Happy Holidays to all!
--Fitz

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