If uDig is your first Eclipse RCP project you are in for a bit of a learning wall.

Scope

Working with the uDig project will bring together three aspects:

• The Java Programming Language
• Eclipse Rich Client Platform Development
• The Geospatial Domain

Please understand that it will take some time to become familiar with each of these areas; be kind to yourself and budget time accordingly. If your team is weak in one or more areas you should strongly considering purchasing books and budging time for learning (or a training course).

uDig

Training Course

My best advice is (of course) to hire Refractions Research for our week long training course:

• uDig Consulting, Support and Training

If you are working for an academic institution please have your professor contact us; we can make our training materials available to you.

uDig Tutorials

Other than that please jump on in; the udig-devel email list is a good place to ask questions. Please go through the "getting started" tutorials in the developers guide and ask lots of questions on the email list and IRC.

• Getting Started
  • SDK Quickstart
  • Plugin Tutorial
  • Custom Application Tutorial
  • Wokrbench Tutorial

As you go through the tutorials please understand it is not enough just to get them to run - you will need to do all the "bonus" questions at the end in order to understand how to turn on tracing, or distribute your custom application to your customers.

uDig Documentation

The Developers Guide is structured in the same manner as the Eclipse Documentation:

• Developers Guide
  • UDIG Guidelines
  • Eclipse House Rules (from Contributing to Eclipse Principles, Patterns and Plug-ins)
  • User Interface Guidelines

The Developers Guide is not complete; or always up to date. The document is contains our notes as we built the application and were learning the Eclipse RCP environment.

The developers guide does not cover as much scope as much information as our commercial training materials. In many places you will need to learn by using the debugger to step through functionality you are interested in. The extension point documentation and javadoc information can also be of assistance.

Eclipse Rich Client Platform

RCP Documentation in the Help Menu

A really good source of information (that is always current) is included right in Eclipse:

• Start up eclipse and select Help > Help Contents from the menu bar. Choose Platform Plug-in Developers Guide
• Also available online:
  • Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede: http://help.eclipse.org/ganymede/index.jsp
  • Eclipse 3.3 Europa: http://help.eclipse.org/help33/index.jsp
• Remember wizards and cheat sheets included in your copy of Eclipse are always up to date!

TCP Tutorials

Tutorials:

• Rich Client Tutorial Part 1
• Rich Client Tutorial Part 2
• Rich Client Tutorial Part 3
• Creating an Eclipse View

Reference Material and Reading List

After going through the Eclipse RCP Tutorials you may want some background information on all the moving parts.

Some useful links that really helped us out:

• Notes on the Eclipse Plug-in Architecture contains the original lolly-pop diagrams used to show eclipse extension points

Books:

• Eclipse Rich Client Platform : Design, Coding, and Packaging Java (TM) Applications
• Contributing to Eclipse Principles, Patterns and Plug-ins
• Building Commercial Quaility Plug-ins

For more information about these books please check out the Reading List from the developers guide.