Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

In 3.3M6, the PDE team is bringing you an enhanced product editor. We have created a new splash page with some nice templates people can easily use (thank you Kim).

Enjoy! Hopefully someone will integrate linerider into a splashscreen 😉

PDE Build is somewhat of a black art in the Eclipse community. In my opinion, it’s something that we just lack tooling for. The situation is really no different than it was back in the day in creating an Eclipse RCP-based product without the product tooling (remember, it was an easy 58 steps and modifying a ton of config files ;p). Unfortunately, the tooling effort around PDE build has never really made it into plan, however, the greatness that is the Eclipse community seems to have started a solution: introducing PluginBuilder. I suggest people support or contribute to the project. In the future, I would like to even see something like it in PDE UI. Eclipse is you, right ;)?

In the spirit of the “PDE is so smart” plan item for 3.3, Brian Bauman of PDE fame has added a nifty hook so that when you refactor a project name that has the same symbolic name as the plug-in/bundle it contains, it will update the symbolic name in the manifest to the new one. Brian claimed he was aided by the help of the easy button…

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who voted in the Eclipse Community Awards, I appreciate the support. I haven’t been able to blog lately due to being in shock from the last episode of 24, but I feel I need to inform people of a subtle, yet important change (oops) in PDE. The vmargs of your current host platform will now be respected in your self-hosted (launch) platform. Technically this means that you get your vmargs pre-pended to your self-hosted configuration’s vmargs. This helps Mac people and also people who don’t like seeing out of memory errors 😉

One small change that wasn’t really announced recently in PDE was in relation to how the dreaded “body text” is handled. If you had an extension that had something like a description attribute, it would be impossible to find how to modify that attribute. Well, things have changed 🙂

The PDE team has been spending a lot of late nights the past few days working on getting everything ready for 3.3M5. Here’s a sneak peak of just some of the things coming in by the end of this week 🙂

Bringing Sexy Back to PDE Form Validation

Mike Pawlowski has done a fantastic job in improving the PDE editors in 3.3M5; this is only a snapshot of what he has done 🙂

Update Site Target Provisioner

I have spent the past few days working on an update site provisioner for PDE. What this basically means is that you can goto your Target Platform preference page and add plug-ins to your target platform by pointing to update sites 🙂 This is all part of PDE’s provisioning story, and if you think about it, there is the possibility of adding target provisioner’s that can work with OSGi’s OBR or maybe those crazy Maven heathens can figure out how to integrate a target provisioner for a Maven-based environment.

This is only a small sneak peak of what the PDE team has accomplished for 3.3M5, so please pay attention to the New & Noteworthy for everything 🙂

Ever wanted to know where those fancy templates come from in PDE? Well, I have a new article that goes over some of the facilities PDE provides to hook in your own templates. It’s my hope that people create more templates for their projects as one of the things that I found that helped me greatly learning about Eclipse was the templates. How cool was it to generate a RCP mail application in a few seconds!?

I revisited the JRE export feature after getting some good feedback from people and a bug report (that’s how open-source works, right? ;p). In the next I-build, the product editor will be enhanced to include a new section for JRE bundling in the Launching tab (Note, the margins are a bit off now, but you get the idea ;o).

I did some work in 3.3M4 that allows you to flag missing exported packages (quickfix will be in 3.3M5):

In my opinion, the problem with this particular feature is that the default is IGNORE which means most people won’t know about it, therefore won’t use it (except for those people who have felt the pain of forgetting to export a new package). What does the community think there, should the default level be set to WARNING? This would inherently make everyone follow ‘The Eclipse Way’ (best practice ;p?) by exporting all their packages. However, the idealist in me thinks people will be exporting all their packages anyway and marking the proper ones internal. If you have some thoughts on this issue, please comment 🙂