My Experience in Building the CoBrA Eclipse Viewer

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My Experience in Building the CoBrA Eclipse Viewer

• Harry CheneBiquity Meeting 2004-03-10

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Eclipse is many things in one!

• Its an open source project
• Its an open community
• Its a platform for tool integration
• Its a technology for building reusable and
  extensible software
• Its a Java IDE

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Eclipse CoBrA

• Why am I interested in Eclipse?
• Need a GUI for monitoring and browsing the
  internal process of the Broker
• Extensible
• Cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Familiar user interface and widgets
• Easy to install and patch updates
• JSP/Servlets Java Swing -- no good!

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Some Eclipse Vocabularies

• Eclipse Plug-in a modular component that
  contributes certain functionality to the platform
• Eclipse Plug-in Feature a special plug-in that a
  developer creates to enable one-click
  install/update of his own plug-in contribution

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Local Toolbar
View
Perspective
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CoBrA Eclipse Viewer (CEV)

• A tool for browsing the knowledge and policy that
  are stored in the Context Broker and for
  monitoring the reasoning process of the Broker.
• It can be used as a stand alone application for
  browsing OWL ontology documents or models.
• Inspired by the Java Spider application
• http//www.javaspider.org/

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Demo ...
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Few words about Eclipse

• Why should you be interested in the Eclipse?
• For the researchers, its a great tool for
  building professional looking GUI front end
• For the students, its a hot skill to put on your
  resumes. Eclipse is HOT (Mozilla, Sun, SemWeb
  central and more..)

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Few more words about Eclipse

• The learning curve is not short
• Requires a good understanding of the design
  patterns
• Requires some experience in Java Swing and GUI
  development
• Know how thread works, actions, listeners.
• A key skill Monkey See, Monkey Do

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Links

• http//cobra.umbc.edu/
• http//www.eclipse.org/