Here’s a tip for you if you love internationalization and hate waste. You can easy find broken externalized strings using the Source->Find Broken Externalized Strings command…
After you do that, you get a list of broken strings that you can prune to trim the size of your NLS-related classes.
Less waste is good.
The Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar in a couple weeks on Gemini…
Gemini Project Lead Mike Keith is presenting a webinar on the relationship between Java EE and OSGi and what the Gemini project is doing in this area. He will detail its relationship to the standards and highlight the role it is playing in implementing a next generation of Java EE architectures. He will go over the various components of the project and show how they can be used by applications and tools alike.
If you are interested in OSGi, I recommend registering. I’ll be there.
I had a nice 52 mile bike ride yesterday and came across some beautiful bluebonnets…
Besides being the Texas state flower, when you start seeing bluebonnets in Austin it means summer is coming and my heat acclimation runs will be starting.
I can’t wait to feel the burn 🙂
I had a colleague ping me today saying that he likes Eclipse but wished there was some terminal access inside of Eclipse (he’s a Linux guy). I told him I had a solution via the Target Management (TM) project at Eclipse. In essence, the TM project creates data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote (mainframe down to embedded) systems, their connections, and their services. While that sounds all great, let me just dive into what TM offers that most people would find useful.
First, to fulfill my colleague’s request of opening a local shell in Eclipse, TM handles that well (you should start with the Remote System Explorer perspective), simply open the Remote Systems view and right click on the Local Shells item to open a shell as shown below.
On top of local access, TM can even do better and give you access to remote systems. For example, I find myself hacking on build.eclipse.org a lot and the ability to seamlessly open a shell, browse the file system and edit files is priceless…
Did you know about TM and the remote system capabilities? I believe TM is one of those hidden gems in Eclipse.
The Twitter bots know how to get you where it hurts…
And again…
What’s next?
In Eclipse 3.6 M7, it will be easier to access the OSGi Console within the running Eclipse. The Equinox team added a org.eclipse.osgi.framework.console.ConsoleSession service that you can use to get the input and output to a console session. The PDE team took advantage of this recently by extending the org.eclipse.ui.console.consoleFactories extension point and allowing you to bring up the OSGi console easily…
This was feature was really put in for some members of the Equinox team but thank you to Dave Carver for encouraging me to blog about it so other people would know about.
Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at Texas Linux Fest 2010 which happens to take place in my beautiful town of Austin, Texas…
In a theme similar to what I blogged about a couple days ago about getting involved with open source, I plan to give a talk entitled Open Source from the Trenches: How to Get Involved with Open Source and Be Successful. It’s a long drawn out title, but the basic gist of it is that I have 25 minutes to share my experience in open source land with the audience. I’ve learned a lot from everyone I have met a long the way and plan to divulge some of the lessons learned. I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous as I have never given this type of talk before…
For those from the Eclipse community, anything else you want me to say that you may have learned a long the way? I think we have a special place in the open source community as we tend to dance between the line of commercial and open source really well compared to other open source communities. I was going to say “dance with the devil” but that would be very freetard of me, I’m more pragmatic these days 😉
Anyways, if you’re in the Texas area, I highly recommend attending the conference. I’m personally looking forward to these talks:
I hope to see people there. If you’re in the area and want to meet for frosty beverages, let me know. On top of that, we Red Hatters also plan to have a lot of Fedora swag at the event too (I’ll have Eclipse stickers).
According to this article, Integrated Development Environments (IDE) are like cockpits…
I kind of agree, except my IDE doesn’t have missiles (yet)…
Now, at last, hardware design teams can use Eclipse as a basis for their own customized IDEs, based on the commercial and open-source plugins that they need in their central cockpit for hardware design.
…
During dogfights (one-on-one acrobatic fights), a fighter jet pilot needs to keep his attention focused on the enemy aircraft. He cannot afford to keep looking down at his dashboard in order to check his weaponry status. Instead, he uses what is known as a Head-Up Display (HUD). This display consists of a transparent screen through which the pilot looks at his opponent. At the same time, the HUD projects extra information like air speed and altitude on the screen. This way, the pilot can keep his head up and remain looking at the surrounding environment, while still keeping track of critical data.
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A HUD is not a substitute for pilot skills, but it enhances the pilot’s capabilities to levels that are unreachable without this technological support.
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Software engineers, like hardware designers, continuously work with code, documentation, build scripts, and logs. What can they use as their cockpit?
I kind of like the analogy of having a central console (and missiles). I don’t like the analogy in the sense that a cockpit also implies complexity. I think that IDEs aim to simplify people’s workflows instead of making the more complex. The only thing complex is the initial learning curve required to learn the instruments. What do you think?
Anyways, give the article a read… it talks about the success of Eclipse in the embedded software development space and how Eclipse is now being used in hardware design due to Sigasi (a startup that focuses on Eclipse-based VHDL tools). I actually met the Sigasi folks in person at the last Eclipse Summit Europe and we went for a nice jog around Ludwigsburg. Small world, eh?
I can only wish them success as the Eclipse ecosystem is all about supporting companies like this.
Bill Higgins filed an amusing bug today about stop using the floppy disk icon to represent saving things in Eclipse-land. I guess I’ve been doing computers for awhile that the thought never crossed my mind until today. I mean, floppy discs aren’t used by modern computers anymore and I’m pretty sure kids coming into college these days aren’t aware of what they really are besides the basics. I guess a similar analogy here is the difference between 8-track tapes and compact discs. But what else would you replace the icon with? A fluffy cloud?
Kids are all about saving things to the cloud these days. Just chuck it in a BigTable and it’s alright.
What do you think? Never forget?
On a side note, I know can’t get that Don’t Copy That Floppy song out of my head. Thanks guys.
Looks like some people are exposing OSGi on Lotus Domino servers.
I especially like the part when they mention the benefits of extensibility, easy deployment and leveraging existing OSGi assets. Oh, the mention that they get “better tooling with Eclipse IDE and its first class Java and plugins editors and Java debugger” is a nice touch too. In all seriousness, the more OSGi gets exposed in the significantly large Lotus ecosystem the better.
