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Posts Tagged with “eclipse”

April 28, 2008
8 Comments

I love transparency

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I have to admit it, I love interviewing potential interns almost as much as I love plug-ins and double chocolate-chip macadamia nut cookies.

I enjoy hiring interns for two main reasons:

  • Mentoring is incredibly enjoyable for me, especially with students
  • I get to have a field day searching for stuff on Google, Facebook, Myspace.

Why am I bringing this up… well, I came across this article today on teachers and how the transparency of the internet is making things problematic. In the case of my lucky interns, it makes for a sometimes comical interview process. I’m usually suspicious of the candidate if I can’t find anything via a google search or some other mechanisms. Sure, I search avenues like CIA.vc, Ohloh and SF.net for more important information, but what’s the point to life without a little comedy :)?

The point I’m trying to make is that the internet is changing the way the workforce operates. It is making the activities of people transparent in ways never imagined. It’s almost like having a little camera follow you around. For example, I just noticed Peter Friese ‘tag’ me in a photo trying to save the Modeling community with bug 109137:

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with this photo, it’s legit, it proves that I was working at Eclipse Forum Europe instead of drinking German beer!

In the end, transparency is here to stay, whether you want it or not. The question is how we deal with it and how it will change the workforce? How have your companies or projects adapted to this new world? How have YOU adapted to this new world? Are you avoiding social sites and pro-actively trying not to be indexed by the internet? Do you plan to name your kid ‘Mike Smith’ (a common American name) and hope it’s impossible to find relevant information? Are you becoming a Luddite :)?

Thoughts? I’m just curious how people are living with this new reality.

April 23, 2008
No Comments

Eclipse Meet and Greet @ EFE Tonight

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Just a reminder for those out there at Eclipse Forum Europe… there is an Eclipse Meet and Greet tonight starting at 9:15pm

Rumor on the street is that Eclipse evangelist Wayne Beaton will be doing magic tricks for everyone.

April 22, 2008
10 Comments

Fair and Balanced @ JavaOne

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I just noticed that at JavaOne, there will be a “fair and balanced” Eclipse RCP versus the Netbeans Platform talk given by Kai Toedter from Siemens and Geertjan Wielenga from Sun.

I’m not one to say anything… but is this really fair and balanced? Wouldn’t it be better to have Kai moderate and maybe have someone like Wayne Beaton represent Eclipse …and Geertjan represent Netbeans?

April 22, 2008
16 Comments

Plug-in Development Tip

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Ever wanted to browse for a Java class but not import the whole universe in your workspace? Well here is a tip for you… I’ll do it in pictures.

I start with an empty workspace… and I want to find the EObject class from EMF. I Ctrl+Shift+T my way to sadness:

🙁

However, there is a Plug-ins view in Eclipse from PDE that allows me to add plug-ins to ‘Java Search.’

Now I try searching for my EObject class:

Now I’m happy 🙂

April 22, 2008
2 Comments

Ohayo!

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From the looks of it, I think we have our first Japanese Eclipse blogger on PlanetEclipse. Welcome Hiroki Kondo! He has also written an Equinox article over in Japan too!

Everyone should welcome him! He was a bit worried to be syndicated on the planet because he thought his English wasn’t good enough… but I disagree! English wasn’t my first language either, but I found that the more I write in it, the better I get! Plus, it makes for a convenient excuse if I say something silly 🙂

On the whole, I love to see fresh faces on PlanetEclipse, especially when they come from cool countries like Japan! Here’s to making more inroads with the Japanese Eclipse community! Kampai! Cheers!

April 21, 2008
No Comments

Hello Wiesbaden and EFE 2008

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Eclipse Forum Europe (EFE) 2008 started today in Wiesbaden, Germany. I’m only suffering minor jet lag at the moment 🙂

There was a lot of interesting tutorials today. Since I love plug-ins, I decided to stop by the ‘Developing Rich Client Applications’ tutorial hosted by Benjamin Pasero (not working on Jazz work items at the moment ;p), Matthias Lübken and Stefan Reichert. There was a good number of attendees that did a really good job of following the tutorial content:

Now it’s time for a jet-lag induced afternoon nap.

April 21, 2008
10 Comments

An Eclipse-based Facebook Application (Part 1)

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So, the first thing I do when I write an Eclipse-based application, or any application for that matter is set a quick baseline of what I want done. For my first milestone, I decided I simply wanted to be able to log into Facebook. I figured, this would be a good start… it would require me to use the Facebook API in some fashion. This would force me to create a plug-in for the Facebook API which I would reuse when I started to do things like update my status from Eclipse. So my first stop was to look at the Facebook Java APIs since that would make life easier for me.

I found a cool project hosted at Google Code that contained some Java APIs. The only problem was that it seemed you needed a million jars to use these APIs. As an Eclipse plug-in afficiandio, I knew how to handle this… I’ll create a new plug-in! I downloaded all the jars and then launched the ‘New Plug-in Project from Exisiting Jars’ wizard which allows me to quickly create a plug-in by pointing to those existing jars.

To give my newly created plug-in some polish, I’ve decided to do a couple things. First, I’ll only export the packages that my consumers will need to work with the Facebook API:

In the Eclipse and OSGi world, Java packages are the unit of modularity. My consumers shouldn’t care about the other packages and I don’t feel like supporting those packages downstream so I won’t expose them. Since I don’t expose them, my consumers won’t be able to use any classes from those non-exported packages. This provides a nice way to keep your API really “internal.” For my next magic trick, I will make sure to set the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment (BREE) for my plug-in to J2SE-1.5:

BREEs are a way of telling Eclipse and OSGi that your plug-in at a minimum, requires Java 5.0 to run. This is cool because the Eclipse runtime won’t activate your plug-in if it’s running on Java 1.4… only Java 5.0 and above. The runtime will also give a message out stating that the plug-in can’t activate because the mininum BREE hasn’t been yet… also cool!

So with my new Facebook API plug-in setup and polished to my liking, we can go and start exercising that API in interesting ways. The first way will be finding a way to log-in to Facebook and that will be discussed in Part 2.

  • Lessons Learned
    • Start simple and iterate as you make progress
    • Use the ‘New Plug-in Project From Existing Jars’ wizard to package your dependencies
    • Don’t forget to set BREEs, they can save your consumers some heartache!
    • Export packages from plug-ins that consumers are only interested in


If you like this type of material, let me know. If there’s a good response, that’s usually motivation for me to do things faster.

April 21, 2008
No Comments

Facebook on a Plane

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So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some hacking while being on long airplane flights. Usually, I hack Eclipse-related things that somehow end up in milestone releases, but I figured I needed to enlighten myself with something new and refreshing.

For inspiration, I went and talked to an old college buddy of mine I trust. I happen to trust crazy people who preferred to do back-tracing solvers in PHP instead of LISP or C++ given a choice, but that’s another story (those were the days). This college buddy of mine ended up drinking the web 2.0 koolaid recently… he told me I should be writing Facebook applications (because Facebook is the greatest thing ever). He also called me an old fart for not writing Web 2.0 applications. Since I trust him and I don’t want to be an old fart, I took the bait and said OK, I’ll give this stuff a try at least.

So I went on my quest to write a facebook application and when I was going through the online documentation, I found that I could write a desktop-based facebook application. Furthermore, there were some Java APIs available. I thought to myself, Java… Desktop… I know that space pretty well… why not throw some Eclipse love in there? So within about 20 minutes of reading facebook documentation, I was on my way to writing an Eclipse-based facebook application.

As I was about to start coding, I thought to myself, why not do a blog series about this topic to help people better understand how to create Eclipse-based applications? Maybe it will be useful, may it won’t, but it should be fun! And to be honest, I also had some selfish goals. First, I needed something to kill the time on long airplane flights. Second, I want to be able to update my facebook status in Eclipse and to be able to poke other Eclipse committers like Dave Steinberg, Wassim Melhem and Kim Horne. Also, I didn’t like being called an old fart. So, if you’re interested, I’ll be posting things in parts as time passes and if people show interest. In the end, I want something that kind of looks likes this:

To start, continue reading on to creating An Eclipse-based Facebook Application (Part 1).

April 17, 2008
10 Comments

Deutschland!

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Ah, Deutschland! The land of good beer, fast trains and David Hasselhoff music videos. I’m headed to Eclipse Forum Europe next week in Germany to do a couple talks. I always enjoy my trips to Germany because everyone loves Eclipse there and is very hospitable! Germans seems to love EMF and Model Driven Development (MDD) too… everywhere I go people seem to be doing something with EMF. Now that I think about it, maybe Ed Merks should move to Germany… he could be the David Hasselhoff of the Eclipse community in Germany 🙂

All jokes aside, I’m looking forward to the trip and spreading the Eclipse love! Eclipse Forum Europe is a well run conference with quality speakers. If anyone is up for a beer or for one of those famous Stammtisch’s, please let me know!

April 15, 2008
32 Comments

New Target Platform Preference

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To give plug-in developers out there a heads up… I want to say that there will be a new preference available to you when working with target platforms in 3.4M7:

What does this preference do?

Well, first, let me tell you about how PDE goes to build your target platform. By build, I mean what PDE does when you point it to a location and you get a target platform out of it. There has always been a little magic inside that operation. The magic involves PDE analyzing your target platform location and looking to see if it can find a configuration of plug-ins installed. How did PDE do this? In the the era of before p2, there was a platform.xml file that was kept by Update that listed the set of recognized plug-ins. In the era after p2, there is a file called bundles.info which serves a similar purpose. These files were there so the runtime can make smart decisions on what to actually run when started. For example, you could have 10 versions of plug-in A on disk, but only one version listed in one of those configuration files so when Eclipse is ran, the runtime only knows about what is listed in the configuration file (see a sample bundles.info below).

So if PDE found one of these “configuration files” it would construct your target platform to reflect what would actually be running in your target. If it didn’t find one of these configuration files, it will then just manually scan the file system and build a target platform with what plug-ins PDE found on disk. In the 10 versions of plug-in A case, it would populate the target platform with all 10 versions if it couldn’t find a target “configuration file.”

When p2 was introduced in the SDK (3.4M6), the bundles.info file was always around and caused confusion for people when they grabbed the SDK, unzipped something like WTP and all their dependencies, and pointed their target platform to the location to only see the SDK set of bundles. PDE was almost being too smart here… it’s analysis of the target platform was correct, ie., only the SDK set of bundles have been discovered by p2 and since the target hasn’t been launched, the unzipped set of bundles (WTP) haven’t been discovered yet.

To not break people’s existing workflows, PDE added this preference to the target platform preference page with some smart initialization. If you’re target == host, we will attempt to build the target platform using the target’s configuration. If your target != host, PDE will revert to manually scanning for plug-ins on the file system to build your target platform. It seems 99.9% of the Eclipse plug-in development community has been spoiled by that workflow so PDE needs to adapt. However, if you wish to change this behavior, the preference will allow you to do that based on your needs.

I hope this clarifies things for some people who have been experiencing growing pains with the 3.4M6 version of Eclipse. It pains me to expose this preference, but it seems it may be a good thing in the long run. The important thing to take away here is that an unzipped plug-in != installed plug-in.

Related bugs:
[bug 226037] – initialization policy for target platform should be different based on location
[bug 225148] – P2 PDE target doesn’t work, easily

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