Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

There’s been a lot of hustle and bustle for the latest Eclipse I-build. The p2 guys are pushing hard to get things in and the API Tools camp is making their debut. From the PDE UI camp, I was on an icon conquest today with improving icons in the schema editor:

It’s funny that I agonize over things like icons when probably only a few people in the Eclipse community really care about pushing pixels. In the end, I lost my battle with overlays so another redesign of the schema editor icons will happen in the future to make them more overlay friendly:

I also had fun trying to come up with icons representing OSGi services but I’m going to save that rant for tomorrow.

Another item coming from PDE is a filterable launch configuration:

This is incredibly useful if you want to filter for a set of plug-ins and either enable or disable them. For example, say you wanted no org.apache* plug-ins in your launch config, simply filter for them and click ‘Deselect All’ (it’s filter-sensitive now). No more going through and checking things individually! Everyone can thank Ian Bull for his persistence in getting this enhancement in.

The other thing I’m looking forward to in the upcoming I-build is improved colored label support. Look for PDE to adopt this in things like the ‘Open Plug-in Artifact’ dialog and other places that make sense. If you’re interested in test driving this functionality, look for a class called StyledCellLabelProvider in the 3.4M6 release.

Oh, and JDT Core released some crazy changes to support external class folders. I plan on looking at this support in depth after my vacation to see if we can close an old outstanding issue in PDE.

That’s all that comes across my mind for now 🙂

The PDE and Equinox Framework teams have been busy graduating a concept of enable and disable for the runtime.

What does this mean? Well, bundles can essentially be disabled and prevented from starting due to some reasoning. This concept is very useful to the security work that is going on in the Equinox incubator. To help test this concept, the OSGi console was enhanced to support some new commands (enable/disable):

I also decided to polish up the Plug-in Registry view in PDE to enable power users to do some advanced bundle-related operations:

As a power user, don’t be a stupid power user and stop/disable some important bundles in your runtime instance 🙂

On a side note, if you want to help PDE improve the Plug-in Registry view even more, I filed an enhancement regarding exposing a Diagnose action similar to what is available in the OSGi console.

I had a bit of time to reflect on the Equinox Summit and here are my take aways:

• p2 development is progressing very quickly
• Dynamic-aware programming (service / extension registry) within OSGi is hard (we should adopt a standard way by Eclipse 4.0)
• Service Activator Toolkit (SAT) is making its way into Equinox
• It’s p2 not P2
• Next time on pay-per-view: Spring-OSGi versus Declarative Services
• It’s time to move the Equinox console out of the framework itself
• Ottawa has a cat problem
• ECF has some new requirements due to p2 to support adaptive downloading
• Creating a standard and lightweight way to pass messages between Equinox instances is a bit tricky (178927,201154,4922)
• I fear the p2 UI will suffer from the sins of our past. We really need to move away from doing everything within Eclipse. The p2 UI should take hints from Firefox. I’d rather have p2 come up with a standard package for information (analogous to the XPI format) and allow people to use the embedded browser to install things via one click.
• Should Eclipse.org maintain a central metadata repository to avoid RPM Hell? A large central repository is what Linux distros have moved to as they have learned from the past cries of their users.
• Having an “Eclipse Installed” sticker on your laptop can cause you to meet interesting people at the airport
• p2 plans to go live during Eclipse 3.4M5
• p2 will be requiring developers to do build-to-build upgrades using p2
• Note: This is so crucial it’s not even funny. One of the biggest reasons the old Update code didn’t get more love is because we didn’t “eat our own dog food” so to speak.

On the whole, the trip was very enjoyable. It was a pleasure to meet new people and see some faces I haven’t see in awhile. Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and Jeff for putting this event together. Maybe it’s time for a PDE Summit in Austin :)?

In response to Glyn’s post, I figure I would show people how to create a ‘hello world’ bundle using PDE (I cry these days if I ever see someone setting up their classpath ;p).

• File->New->Project
• Select Plug-in project
• Make sure the target platform points to Equinox



• Select the Hello OSGi template



• Click Finish and we’re done. Feel free to launch using PDE’s facilities