Introducing Myself to Planet Eclipse

Unfortunately, my first post is already published. However, I would like to introduce myself, my new blog and the topics I want to present here to planet eclipse.

I’m a PhD student at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. My research work deals with code recommender systems, i.e., I’m working on tools that (aim to) support developers on their daily work by improving several features of current IDEs.

My research focus is on mining large-scale code repositories to find valuable knowledge in example code and bringing back this knowledge to the IDE by the means of (i) intelligent code completion, (ii) extended Javadocs, or (iii) smart bug detection tools that warn developers if they misuse the framework’s API. The Eclipse Code Recommender is my tool where I’m trying to put all things in I’ve found valuable and want others to give it a try and to report whether these ideas are actually useful to someone.

(BTW: Thanks to the guys from EclipseSource and Yoxos which provide this incredible huge code repository of Eclipse plug-ins. I "misused" this one already several times on late Sunday evenings to get tons of example code for my studies :-) ) .

So, what is my objective for this new blog? It’s twofold. First, I would like to share my ideas and new tools with the Eclipse community to learn what might help us on our daily work (and maybe get some feedback on these ideas). But additionally, I want to write about other research tools that do fancy things with Eclipse and encourage others to give them a try. And as you have read recently, there is much interesting work going on (like Code Bubbles but also many other interesting tools) that are worth be recognized by the community.

A few words on my own Eclipse experience: I made my first steps with Eclipse with version 2.1 (how long is this...?) and started to write my first plug-ins with version 3.0. Since then I’ve been using Eclipse and (for whatever reasons) never touched another IDE (except a short time where I tried Netbeans but came back rather quickly). As part of my teaching assistant work I’m organizing Eclipse Hands-on trainings where we “create” round about a dozen Eclipse programmers per semester - somehow my personal, little summer of code, I guess :-D

I think, that’s it. I would love to get in contact with you, hear your thoughts about research projects, ideas and tools I’m going to present, but I'm also interested in whatever you think that could be improved to help Eclipse to stay the best IDE on the planet. See you!

Cheers,

Marcel