Software Tutorials on Google Wave: Eclipsy

Google Wave absolutely floors me, but it isn't available yet. I think that Wave is going to revolutionize teaching software. Consider software tutorials. First, we need something like an Eclipsy, a hypothetical Wave agent/Eclipse plug-in that allows Eclipse to be integrated into a Wave. As one developer goes through the steps in a tutorial, a second developer (or even the same developer with a microphone), could be giving a verbal description of the actions.

Once the expert has successfully performed the tutorial, a student else could play it back and see each step in the processes. I see major advantages of using Wave. Perhaps you could play back the development in your Eclipse while listening to the process, with Eclipsy in a playback-mode. At the end of this, you would know that the process worked with your configuration. Assuming that it did work, you could then go through the steps yourself while listening to the audio & perhaps watching the steps in Eclipse running on some virtual machine that you would watch as your copy the steps at home. (Two monitors would be nice for this.) The ability to pause during the playback is a big advantage of a Wave solution.

With many Web 2.0 tools like Grails, you are iteratively developing you application. For example, you might start by defining all of your domain objects and use scaffolding to build the controllers. You would then define the relationships between all of the objects. Next, you might add more attributes. To complete the domain objects, you could go in and add the constraints. This sort of iterative approach seems perfect for the as-yet-hypothetical Eclipsy.

Typically, you would also follow an iterative approach to evolving the views and the controllers. Much of the skill in this approach is having a feel to know what to do in each iteration. Eclipsy would be a good way to developing this.

In a complementary role, Eclipsy seems like it could be used for version control. At the very least, Eclipsy would be tracking the state of each source code file and your project configuration. This means that it could also function as a version control system that you could replay to get to any state in your development.