Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I have a new feature that I put in PDE that I’m requesting feedback on. I need feedback soon since I will disappear and bury myself in EclipseCon preparation and also be vacationing in Whistler, BC for a week.

I created a new schema attribute type called ‘identifier’ that can be used when you define your extension points. Instead of explaining things in words, I like to do things using pictures:

In the picture above, I’m working with the ‘pespectiveExtensions’ extension point. If you’re familiar with this extension point, it allows you to extend perspectives defined in other plug-ins. It lets you do this by referencing the id of an already defined perspective, but this suffers from the magical identifier problem in Eclipse. To help with this issue, I’ve modified the pespectiveExtensions extension point to have its ‘targetID’ field be of type ‘identifier’ and be based on perspective ids (in simple terms).

Now what does this look like to end users working with the ‘perspectiveExtensions’ extension point? Look at the figure below:

Now, instead of the ‘targetID’ field being just a string, it becomes hyperlinkable along with a ‘Browse…’ button that when clicked, displays all the valid identifiers for this attribute (in this case, it’s all the perspective ids found). On top of that, if you notice in the Problems view, identifiers that don’t belong will be properly flagged with a warning.

If you want to toy with this functionality and provide feedback, checkout the latest I-build of Eclipse where Paul Webster assisted me in the PDE kitchen by modifying some of the Platform UI extension points. Try to create a command with keybinding now >:)

Thanks to Paul Webster and Remy Suen for motivating me to finish this feature.

Note: There’s no guarantee that this feature is set in stone yet so don’t go changing all your extension points just yet. The PDE kitchen is closed until I get back from Whistler 🙂

So, in the next release of Eclipse (or the next I-build), you will be able to quickly browse to your exported package of choice via the Open Plug-in Artifact (Ctrl+Shift+A) dialog:

Hopefully this makes plug-in development a bit more enjoyable 🙂

I turned on my instant messenger software this morning and got bombarded by two-related questions. The first question was in regards to how to find and use the ‘Organize Manifests’ wizard within PDE. That was easy to answer. The next question was roughly the same as the previous but dealt with the ‘Externalize Strings’ wizard. When I answered where the wizard was, I said just check out the ‘Exporting’ section of the Manifest editor’s Overview page…

He told me my answer was wrong.

I guess I had a different picture of what should be in that section than what is really there (ooops). What does a crafty Eclipse committer due to make sure he doesn’t look wrong? The solution is to quickly write a patch and make sure it gets into the next build and claim that the option would be there if you used the latest and greatest:

See, I was right 🙂

I was helping a colleague debug an issue in regards to self-hosting today and the solution took a lot longer to find given how simple the problem was. The problem could have been easily solved if we validated our launch configuration before we actually launched. There’s an option to validate (off by default) to prevent headaches:

Note that if you have a really large product, validation can take a little while so that’s why this option is off by default.

Thanks for using PDE!

I like old bugs:

We just fixed the oldest open PDE bug today thanks to a contribution. The bug may have taken 5 years to close, but hey, with a patch it only took 6 hours! Any other old bugs open against Eclipse that are still haunting you these days… how about submitting a patch :)?

For those who are living on the Eclipse bleeding edge and have a ton of launch configurations like me, you may appreciate this little new feature:

In Eclipse 3.4M5, you’ll be able to quickly browse to various logs based on your launch configurations. This is useful when bad things happen on startup and you have to hunt for the log… now you can do it quickly in a couple of clicks. It’s the little things that count, right :)?

A special thank you to Jacek for contributing the patch.

As a reminder for those people who manage Eclipse-based products, there’s a good opportunity to nominate your product for an Eclipse Technology Award. I was surprised to see the short-list of nominations given the breadth of the Eclipse eco-system and the number of sponsors this year at EcilpseCon.

On the bright side, I have a theory that there’s a lot of managers out there just waiting until the last minute to give their submissions for their excellent products and projects 🙂

So Brian and I completed our webinar today (thanks for attending!) and we took advantage of the option to customize our questions at the end.

Here are the results:

• Do you develop plug-ins or plan to within the next 6 months?
• 87% (75) – Yes
• 8% (7) – No
• 5% (4) – Don’t Know

• Do you build RCP applications or plan to within the next 6 months?
• 64% (52) – Yes
• 22% (18) – No
• 14% (11) – Don’t Know

• What version of Eclipse are you using today?
• 16% (14) – 3.4
• 76% (65) – 3.3
• 7% (6) – 3.2
• 1% (1) – 3.1
• 0% (0) – 3.0

• What version of Eclipse are you shipping products on?
• 10% (8) – 3.4
• 62% (48) – 3.3
• 8% (6) – 3.2
• 0% (0) – 3.1
• 0% (0) – 3.0

I always had a personal interest in how quickly products adopt new releases of Eclipse. The problem with most products is that they are on different release schedules (ie., 18-24 months) compared to the Eclipse 12 month cycle. The challenge is to decide when to move up and if you decide to skip a release, how do you portray that decision to your customers if they complain they can’t use some cool “Paul Webster” (eg., org.eclipse.ui.menus) feature from the latest Eclipse? I also wonder if the circadian release cycle of Eclipse forces other teams to become a bit more agile when it comes to releasing products instead of being stuck in that crappy 24 month cycle.

On a side note, I feel sorry for the one pour soul using Eclipse 3.1 according to the webinar stats 🙁