Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

This screenshot comes from the excellent (possibly the best) PDE tutorial at EclipseCon… it shows where all the different pieces of Eclipse come from and how it becomes very complicated:

~ From the PDE team, with love.

I’m live blogging the What sucks about Eclipse panel. I’m trying to provide answers to the various questions asked as they come in. Sorry if I don’t get everything 🙂

• Why doesn’t Eclipse support nested projects?
• Some backward compatibility issues…
• Why doesn’t Eclipse support word wrapping?
• There was a Google Summer of Code project out of Eclipse that tried to tackle this enhancement. I’m sure the bug is open to contributions.
• Why doesn’t Eclipse support macro recording?
• The TPTP project contains a GUI recorder called AGR. Read about it.
• Why is it so hard to work with actions?
• Paul Webster has done a lot of good work in this area about the new command infrastructure. He gave a talk at EclipseCon about it.
• Why is Eclipse UI’s look and feel lagging behind?
• Not conclusive what exactly is lagging…
• Why is there no first class Subversion support in Eclipse?
• Subversive and Subclipse are the current options. There is a project proposal currently… there is a newsgroup out there also for people to participate. Apparently, the Eclipse project has excellent turnaround time and the Subversive project proposal has been approved.
• Why is it so hard to find out what new things installed actually do? How do you discover new functionality?
• We need to connect the existing Welcome framework with new features that are installed. Users need to be aware of what goes in. Looks like the frameworks are there, they just need to be connected.
• Why is GEF so hard to work with the existent editor infrastructure?
• Why can’t PDE Build (or Eclipse in general) provide native installers out of box? That is, provide a Mac installer, Windows installer, RPM, etc…
• There is the new provisioning work going on… there is the Eclipse packaging project… and there is the new Maya proposal.
• Why does every project like PDE, Ant, ATF, WTP, etc… have different XML editors?
• Why do editors and views have to be different and so hard to have an XML view (using the existing editor infrastructure)?
• Why are there modal dialogs in Eclipse like the launch configuration?
• How do we make Eclipse so new users aren’t overwhelmed?
• Capabilities are around to help… but no-one uses it…
• Why doesn’t Eclipse have a good free visual editor…

The Equinox Adaptor Hook demo went well today. Tom Watson and co., did a very good job explaining Adaptor Hooks and how they can be used for various things like monitoring and transformations within the framework (also how large IBM Eclipse-based products were able to shave around 30% of startup time due to the JXE adaptor). For those would couldn’t make the demo, the wiki entry on adaptor hooks provides a good synopsis of how things work.

Well, the news is in, the Eclipse Community Award winners for 2007 have been announced. Congratulations to all, it was a great year for Eclipse!

I have a confession to make, about four years ago I thought Eclipse was about the source code. I remember grabbing a copy of Eclipse and just being amazed at all the cool things it could do. I spent a lot of time playing with the source, seeing how things were done and tinkering with things. However, it wasn’t until I started to interact with the Eclipse newsgroups that I saw the real side of Eclipse. Eclipse is all about the community, not the source code out there. All of us in the community rely on each other to get questions answered and problems solved (and by doing that, we in turn become part of the Eclipse community).

I just wanted to say thanks to all that have voted and more importantly, thanks to the community. I just view myself as a guy who is simply reciprocating the wonderful help I have received from people like Ed Merks on the newsgroups; Paul Webster, John Arthorne, Kim Horne, Philippe Ombredanne (and many more people!) on IRC.

To all, let’s keep the ball rolling by just helping each other out and taking the time to help new community members (there are many outlets to do this). The greatest strength in Eclipse lies in its community and lets remember, in the end, Eclipse is about people.

Wow, I go on a small vacation and Gunnar totally goes Extreme Makeover on PlanetEclipse (good job Gunnar!) While being stuck at the YVR airport, I just wanted to remind people of the PDE BOF that is going on tomorrow night. This is a good chance to meet the committers, praise the tooling, or more importantly, gripe about problems you face in using PDE’s tools. Does the fact that PDE doesn’t support case insensitive manifest headers well light a fire under your behind? Or if you’re coming from the OSGi world, why the heck is the required bundles section on the left side instead of the imports section on the dependencies page? The PDE team is always looking for feedback from our users and here is your chance!

After joining the circle of Eclipse committers who have won competitions, I’d like to make sure everyone is aware that the PDE team is “so filled with the joy of EclipseCon coming up that we cannot contain it.” At EclipseCon, we have declared “PDE Monday” that starts with our wonderful tutorial, “Fundamentals of Eclipse and RCP Development.” We have a lot of new content this year for the tutorial so you should definitely make time if you’re new to Eclipse plug-in development. There will be four committers capable of answering your questions this year and giving you the attention you deserve by attending our tutorial 😉

After the tutorial, we are hosting a soiree (BOF) in the evening which will be followed by drinks 😉

I was looking over the current nominations for Eclipse Technology Awards and the list is a bit thin 🙂 How about everyone pick one of their favorite applications and get in touch with the author(s) and tell them to nominate their application? I personally have contacted the authors of jUploader and uDig which are two applications I especially enjoyed using. What are your favorite applications that you would like to nominate?

I spent some time recently going through some of the submitted short talks for EclipseCon. Before I list them, here is a reminder for everyone to register or propose more talks. EclipseCon really is THE Eclipse conference in my opinion. It easily is the conference with the most committers attending and has the most talks from the “trenches.”

– Getting Your Projects Website Running with Phoenix
– Building on Mylar
– Styling SWT Widgets Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
– Introducing COSMOS: A Systems Management Framework
– Pack200 compression for your plugins – how to use it, and how it works
– Providing services on top of pdebuild
– Eclipse in the Enterprise
– Versioning plug-in is good for you and the eclipse ecosystem
– Eclipse Linux Distros Project Overview