the corner office

August is drawing to a close, and the end of August was the deadline I had given myself for tinkering with Eclipse RCP. It's taken longer than I'd expected - being a new parent means coming to terms with a little less 'me-time' - but it has started coming together. I'm by no means well-versed, but I find myself feeling a lot less confused and frustrated than I was back in April and May and June. So I'm not quite sure whether I'll be packing it in just yet.

My motivation for getting to grips with Eclipse was mainly due to me not wanting to resort to web development every time I wanted to whip up a new application at home. Swing was an alternative, but since Eclipse has been my primary IDE for a good few years now, I figured it'd be quite useful to actually get under the hood a bit. My initial goal had been to get to grips with the basics of Eclipse RCP development, finish off one application which I could bang up on my site as a nice 'deliverable' and then move on to something else.

The main pet project I've been tinkering on has been a simple budgeting application, as I've mentioned before. While it's turning out to be pretty useful (living with another currency took some adjusting), and I keep adding new features, it's fairly specific to our own needs and nowhere near being in any state for sharing. Chances are, it never will be, and I'm not sure that the effort required to make it usable to anyone else is worthwhile. As for 'deliverables', I have been jotting down a few notes about how to go about doing things in an ever-growing page [link since gone] on this site, and a fair number of interesting things make it onto my link blog. That will have to do.

Next: reflections on Eclipse RCP development.