A focused learning environment for Eclipse

Abstract

The support available in Eclipse to help software developers learn complex APIs and development tools is inadequate; the support is largely passive and the support typically operates alongside the resources associated with normal software development tasks, thereby overloading the environment with additional complexity. In this paper, we describe an approach that enables a dynamic learning process within the context of a developer's Eclipse work environment. Our approach integrates a mechanism for explicit support of a learning process flow (cheat sheets) with a mechanism for explicit representation of different work contexts (Mylar). We have implemented a working prototype of our approach. We found it relatively easy to integrate cheat sheets with Mylar through available extension points. We describe our architecture and report on some limitations and missing features in the existing plug-ins we discovered as we developed our prototype.