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Posts Tagged with “eclipse”

July 27, 2008
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GEF3D

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Who likes pretty pictures and visualization!? I do!

Check out the GEF3D project:

Kind of cool huh!? The concept is quite cute, GEF3D extends GEF by having 3D enabled draw and controller classes. So, instead of drawing 2D figures (e.g., Draw2D), you can now draw 3D figures! Another cool aspect of the project is that existing GEF-based 2D editors can be embedded into 3D editors with minimal effort.

I’m currently working with the GEF3D project leads to move this project over to Eclipse.org… look for a project proposal soon (GEF3D is already under the EPL). Let me know if you support this project, I’ll put your name down as one of the interested parties in the proposal.

On the whole, I’m excited to see more visualization technologies at Eclipse.org, with Zest coming in last year, GEF3D would make a very nice addition.

July 24, 2008
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OSBootCamp7 Eclipse Videos

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For those who aren’t in the know, there was an OSBootCamp in Ottawa recently that was dedicated to Eclipse. Here are three videos of interest:

Good to see that there’s some evangelism going on during Eclipse’s typical off months 😉

July 23, 2008
2 Comments

Eclipse BugDay is Friday

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It’s that time of month again… it’s Eclipse BugDay this Friday. Here are bugs I find interesting from PDE:

[220109] – [refactoring] Add a PDEDeleteParticipant
[233682] – open extension point by double clicking in the manifest editor
[184084] – [refactoring] Renaming an .exsd file should cause plugin.xml to be updated
[241505] – New Library Plug-in wizard should allow to set a BREE
[240597] – Refactor site.xsl for easier maintenance

Also, this BugDay marks a year since the program was started at Eclipse.

Was it a good idea? Was it successful? I don’t know, but I do know from a bugzilla query that over 200 bugs have been fixed as a result of bugday. That’s not too bad 🙂

In the end, it’s been fun working with new contributors inside of PDE and other projects, thanks for participating!

July 20, 2008
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Eclipse Forms + Databinding

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For those who have used Eclipse Forms in their projects, I’m sure a common request was to include some type of fancy validation using the lovely message manager in Forms. If you use JFace Databinding also in that project, you probably wrote some code to help link databinding’s validation status to the Forms message manager. If you believe this should be common code available in the SDK, please voice your comments on this bug. Better yet, if you have code to donate, feel free to do that also.

July 17, 2008
6 Comments

‘Tis the Season to Refactor

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I like the beginning of new releases because it gives you time to reflect on things you couldn’t do during the crazy end game days. One of those things you couldn’t really do was refactor. I like refactoring for multiple reasons…

  • It allows you to clean up code and strive for simplicity
  • Sometimes allows you to further modularize your code
  • You find instances of code that shouldn’t be referencing certain things
  • It has a side effect of possibly bringing on new contributors…
  • and so on…

I don’t like refactoring for multiple reasons…

  • refactoring a bunch of packages when all your NLS strings are in one sucks
  • refactoring a bunch of packages when dealing with a central image registry sucks

I’m excited to see that already for 3.5M1, we will have a couple refactorings in the Eclipse SDK:

[207704] – Decouple org.eclipse.compare from UI

This is exciting because it now allows people to take advantage of the core Compare code without dragging in the UI. In the past, the core and UI code were all in one plug-in (org.eclipse.compare). This wasn’t good for people who wanted to run compare code headlessly and also people that just wanted to take advantage of the ability to diff things in another context.

Thank you Compare team for making this happen!

[241145] – [refactoring] move UA code into separate plug-ins

On the PDE side of things, I finally decided to refactor out the User Assistance (UA) tooling into separate plug-ins. I did this for two selfish reasons… (1) the PDE core and ui plug-ins were getting big… (2) I wanted to bring on another contributor to PDE to help maintain and grow the user assistance tooling in Eclipse. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that ;)?

Anyways, I highly recommend people to look now and reflect on what they can possibly refactor out for the benefit for the wider Eclipse community. For the eclipse community, it’s a good time to bug Eclipse developers to refactor things that you always wanted… or better yet… provide patches to move things along quicker.

July 10, 2008
4 Comments

A dash of legacy

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Sometimes you just have to laugh at certain bugs.

For those who don’t know, PDE hasn’t supported “-” in bundle symbolic names (plug-in ids) for awhile due to legacy reasons. Before OSGi was introduced in Eclipse, “-” wasn’t a valid character and this is something that has just stuck with PDE for awhile. It’s funny that it wasn’t noticed until recently… I think mainly due to the SpringSource repository having bundles in this format.

The issue will be fixed in 3.4.1 and 3.5M1 releases.

July 7, 2008
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Kinds Words About ECF

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I have to admit… I’m an addict to Google Alerts… I have a lot of alerts setup… with a few of them around Eclipse. I saw this blog post fly by yesterday:

Recently I finished (in so much as any software I develop is actually ever finished) a tool that allows bulk jACT-R model runs to be submitted to a remote server. All in all, it was an amazingly painless experience made possible by ECF, a protocol neutral communications library in the latest release of Eclipse. To be completely honest, while I’ve had dreams about this tool for a long time, it wasn’t until I saw the webinar for ECF that I realized just how feasible this project was.

Before I present my gripes, let me just say that the folks behind this project have done an awesome job. It took about a week to get this whole tool up and running. But there were some headaches, mostly due to documentation (availability, when it’s there it’s good) and mental model mismatches.

It’s always nice to hear fellow developers out there adopting your work and generally being happy with it. For the documentation problem, rumor on the street is that an ECF book will be started soon so that is good news for people craving more documentation.

Good job Scott Lewis and other fellow ECF’rs 😉

June 30, 2008
4 Comments

JFace Databinding is Cool

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I have been getting to know JFace Databinding lately. It was on my TODO list of Eclipse technologies to learn and although things were rough in the beginning, I’m starting really appreciate things. For example, I had a use case where I was binding a value to a text control. By default, the model was being updated on every keystroke which could be fine. However, if you have a complex UI that does fancy validation, it can cause unexpected results like refreshes that you just don’t want. A simple and more natural thing is only to commit a change to the model after the user is done typing instead of every keystroke. The solution in JFace Databinding is simple…

SWTObservables.observeDelayedValue(400, myObservable)

There’s also a nice code snippet that you can run to see how the code works.

June 26, 2008
4 Comments

Austin Eclipse DemoCamp Reminder

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Just a quick reminder that the Austin DemoCamp is today. We have about 27 people registered and a few presentations to go over before we head for some classic Austin BBQ.

I will be discussing (slides) some of the new things in PDE for the Ganymede release. Ken Ryall from Nokia will be discussing the CDT and how Nokia leverages it in its Carbide product. Bradley Childs from IBM will be introducing the JavaScript Development Toolkit (JSDT) which I’m very interested in. When I rub my magical crystal ball, I see PDE in the future integrating with the JSDT in some ways when e4 starts taking off 😉

June 26, 2008
2 Comments

EclipseDay @ Google Recap

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I have to say EclipseDay at the Googleplex was quite a success! Thank you to Robert, Mustafa and Leslie for putting things together!

The day started out with a talk about eBay’s usage of Eclipse by Michael Galpin. It was interesting to see how eBay turned Eclipse into its smorgasbord tooling platform to build applications for eBay’s website. When I asked if there was any issues or regrets in adopting Eclipse, Michael looked a bit stunned, paused for a bit and finally said no. I was surprised by the response 😉

I gave a talk about tips and tricks around plug-in development that I found useful through my experience of hacking plug-ins. It was cool to see the glee on people’s faces when they learned about things like Ctrl+3 and Plug-in Spy.

There was also a lot of CDT fans in the audience. One person was complaining how CDT4 wasn’t fast at indexing his ~20 million LOC product, which could be fair, however, I told him to try out CDT5 which is part of Ganymede. I know that the CDT team spent a lot of time improving the indexer for CDT5 to handle the most ridiculously sized projects out there. The interesting part of this discussion was the fact that he never bothered to ask about his problems on the CDT newsgroup or mailing list. If you don’t ask, how can you expect someone to help you? I wonder how we can better direct people to asking questions on the newsgroups… I wouldn’t want Eclipse adoption impeded by silly things like people not asking questions about their problems.

Overall, I enjoyed meeting everyone and especially some of the new faces I haven’t seen in person before (hi Mustafa). I hope Google does something like this in the future, maybe on the east coast this time, around their NYC offices ;)?

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