Hello from XP2004 in Garmisch Germany
JBuilderX has a great Open Tools Api (OTA). There are more than 500 tools and component libraries supporting the JBuilder underlying development platform framework. I've known the JBuilder OTA for years now. But I have done nothing with the Eclipse tools API.
So, I am sitting in the “Contributing to Eclipse - Understanding and Writing Plug-ins” hands on tutorial at the Fifth International XP 2004 conference in Garmisch. So far I have written a simple viewer plug-in. Later, I'll extend it and publish it on my local machine. Lots to learn about the plug-in architecture. Weather is great here in Garmisch. The mountains are covered in snow and green trees/lawn.
I survived the tutorial - but it was tough sitting in a room for 8+ hours when it was so nice outside. At least we could open the curtains when we weren't looking at PowerPoint slides and see the beautiful mountains while programming Java.
Eclipse - but isn't that the "competition"?