User:Pliu

My Brief Bio

I am Peter Liu. I began teaching C, C++ and Java programming at the School of Computer Studies in September 1998. I am a computer scientist by training and I love being an educator.[1] My philosophy of education is that teaching and research complement each other. [2] My professional interests are computer science education, open source software development, and geocomputing. I enjoy mentoring students to undertake independent study and applied research projects. I am a member of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), and SIGSOFT (Special Interest Group on Software Engineering). At leisure time, I enjoy doing photography and appreciating paintings. [3] Please visit my website for more details. [4]

My Adventure with Open Source Development at Seneca College

For my professional development, I want to find out how to teach and learn open source development. It is a privilege and honor for me to get immersed in the open source movement at Seneca. From January - April 2009, Jordan Anastasaide has graciously allowed me to go alongside with his Eclipse Web Tools Platform (Eclipse WTP) class such that I may have first-hand experience on open-source development. I am excited about immersing myself in this culture of being open in fixing bugs. As suggested by Jordan, I am going to blog what I have experienced in this community as if I were a reporter on the field. What I have experienced for the last two weeks has already affected how I teach JAC444 and BTP400 this semester. Indeed I am using wikis as a teaching and learning tool for the first time in my teaching career...

The Thrill of Fixing a WTP Bug

I enjoy the experience of fixing a WTP bug. I'm glad to know that I have made a little bit of contribution to the the Eclipse WTP project.

Bug #256185 [5]

• status: a patch created on 3/13/2009; changed to FIXED on 4/27/2009
• ripple effect:

Comment #29 From Valentin Baciu  2009-05-26 11:37:10 -0400: 
*** Bug 277839 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

More Surprises

Time flies. From May to August, Jordan has again graciously allowed me to take part in his second Eclipse WTP class. As far as I'm concerned, the students in his Winter 2009 class have accomplished a lot within a course structure, bearing in mind that they started from zero. [6] I'm looking forward to having another adventure with the Eclipse WTP student team.

Time flies again. I am now exploring the Eclipse Linux Tools project. After inviting Andrew Overholt (Red Hat) to speak to the students in my Java classes (JAC444) on March 9, 2010, I have created Learning Labs for Eclipse Linux Tools. Even though the JAC444 classes will be over by the end of April, interested students can continue with the activities in the Learning Labs. We will see how things are going to unfold...

Beginning with January 2011, I have become an active member on the NexJ Express project team at Seneca College. I am looking forward to working along with a student to work on a sub-project called PostgreSQLAdapter. What's going to happen? We will see...

Email address: peter.liu@senecac.on.ca.

Website: http://cs.senecac.on.ca/~pliu

Blog: http://pliu.wordpress.com

My Applied Research Activities at CDOT

• My Applied Research Log
• Canadian Colleges and Applied Research
• Eclipse (ACM 2011 Software System Award) [7][8]
• Want to be a Good Researcher? Try Teaching (August 18, 2011) [9]
• Software design cannot be neglected (May 9, 2012) [10]
• Lost Programming Skills (IT World, August 05, 2011) [11]
• Researchers Create the First GPS for the Blind [12]
• 10 Highly Valued Soft Skills for IT Pros (2012) [13]

Interesting Links

• Open source can innovate even beyond software (August 01, 2011) [14]
• App developers could make better use of open source: Black Duck (ComputerWorld Canada, 7 April 2009) [15]
• Seneca Update by Russell Pangborn (Toronto Users Group for Power Systems, May 2009) [16]
• Teaching Open Source [17]
  
• Finding Your Way Through The Code (Wayne Beaton)[18]
• Summer Projects for Students (Wayne Beaton) [19]

Three Practical Goals for Summer 2009

• How to create and run an Eclipse plugin?
• How to create and run an Eclipse plugin test?
• Fix an Eclipse WTP bug that is related to testing.
  

Interesting Student Project Ideas for Summer 2009

• Bug 107341 [junit] Support HttpUnit testing by adding a page to the new JUnit wizard [20]
• A list of related WTP bugs (5/28/2009)
• Organzing Eclipse WTP Bugs (inspired by Al Blue) [21]
• JUnit 4 and Eclipse Testing Framework (Bug 153429, NOT WTP-specific) [22]
• How does an Eclipse project (such as WTP) test its GUI? [23]