Planet Eclipse

Kim Moir: Now I see IU, now IU don't

Kim Moir — 2009-11-03T19:55:21+00:00

Eclipse 3.6M3 went out the door over the weekend, along with a lot of Halloween candy.

Sometimes, you can have too much Halloween candy. And sometimes, you can have too many IUs in your p2 repo. Don't believe me - just look at this repo with bogus bundles - scary!

Both scenarios can cause your friendly neighbourhood release engineer pain. This is unusual because we're a very pain tolerant people. To alleviate the suffering, the p2 team added an Ant task in 3.6M3 that allows you to remove bundles from your repo. As much as I love spending quality time at the command line modifying metadata, Ant tasks that automate tedious jobs are even better.

The p2.remove.iu task will remove both the metadata and the bundle from the repository for a specified IU. For example, if you had bogus packed com.ibm.icu.* bundles in your repo, this task would remove them.

<p2.remove.iu>
<repository location="file://${reposource}" />
<iu id="com.ibm.icu" artifacts="(format=packed)" />
<iu id="com.ibm.icu.base" artifacts="(format=packed)" />
<iu id="com.ibm.icu.source" artifacts="(format=packed)" />
<iu id="com.ibm.icu.base.source" artifacts="(format=packed)" />
</p2.remove.iu>

This task is useful if you'd like to remove some built time bundles from your repo. Or just correct a mistake after a release. It happens. In any case, it's all good. Almost as tasty as chocolate.

Related bugs

Support excluding bundles when running p2.process.artifacts task
p2.remove.iu task should have an option to specify to remove packed file only
ICU jars at Eclipse 3.5 update site have size of 0

Ian Skerrett: Eclipse Days in Toronto

Ian Skerrett — 2009-11-03T16:48:52+00:00

Developers in Toronto have a great opportunity to participate in back-to-back Eclipse events: Eclipse Modeling and EclipseRT Day on November 18 & 19. Think of it as a mini-EclipseCon but with polite Canadians saying ‘eh’, ‘pop’ and ‘about’.

Modeling and Eclipse runtime technology (including OSGi and Equinox) are two of the most innovative areas in the Eclipse community. Speaking at this event will be some of the project leaders and committers for these Eclipse projects. There will even be some of the e4 committers talking about the next generation of Eclipse.

If you are an Eclipse user and live near Toronto, you should seriously consider attending. Even if you live outside of Toronto, two days of free Eclipse related session in one place is a great opportunity to learn more about Eclipse technology.

There is no fee to attend but you need to pre-register via e-mail. You can pre-register for both days or you can also register for just the EclipseRT Day or the Modeling Day.

Bob Balfe: Android will kill the iPhone

Bob Balfe — 2009-11-03T16:33:39+00:00

I am sure many have seen the press on Android and all of the features it “does better” than the iPhone.

The one feature I think that will ultimately kill the iPhone is the Android SDK. You can download the Android SDK for Windows, Mac, and Linux and you can also just install it into your existing Eclipse IDE. Just having this available to all Eclipse developers is HUGE. This means you can start playing immediately without owning a specific OS/Computer - like a Mac.

This is a consistent mistake Apple makes over and over and it just shocks me, now Google is taking advantage of it. Don’t get me wrong I think Apple makes great products but the entire “we need control” mentality just exhausts everyone. If the Android devices end up being better hardware than the iPhone then I don’t see how iPhone will be able to compete. I know there is a lot of talk about the iPhone becoming more open and moving to other carriers but I think it just may be too little too late - maybe. Android is around the corner Apple - get moving!

technorati tags: Android, eclipse, iPhone

Chris Aniszczyk: Git Mirrors at Eclipse.org

Chris Aniszczyk — 2009-11-03T15:04:43+00:00

Good news everyone, Git mirrors are going live at Eclipse.org

Please give them a whirl.

If you find any issues, please state them on this bug.

Stephane Bouchet: Updates from ESE

Stéphane Bouchet — 2009-11-03T14:12:00+00:00

Hi all,

goulwen is just coming back from ESE and we are moving EEF forward :)

In response to David, i created a page in the wiki to explain briefly were to get the sources, using this PSF

We started a cvs branch to add some new functionality to EEF, too.
The current stable version resides in the v0.7.1_BRANCH.

BioClipse: Download PDBs with Bioclipse

Ola Spjuth — 2009-11-03T14:00:47+00:00

It is easy to download bioinformatics resources into Bioclipse using the WSDbfetch Web service at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). From console you can use the method:

ws.downloadDbEntry(String db, String query, String format)

From the GUI you can use menu: File > New... and select the Wizard Download > Query WSDbfetch at EBI. Click next and see the many available databases in the dropdown list Supported databases:

Try for example to download the sequence "NM_210721" from the "refseq" database.

If you'd like to download proteins in PDB format, there is a convenience wizard available in the New Wizards dialog available from the menu File > New...

Clicking Next allows for inputting a comma-separated list of PDB IDs, try for example "1ale,2pdz". Clicking next downloads the file to the selected folder in the Navigator, or to the Virtual project if nothing is selected. Below is visualized 2PDZ in the Jmol Editor.

Paul Webster: e4 and injectable command execution

paulweb515 — 2009-11-03T13:57:21+00:00

I'm fond of most of the Command Framework in Eclipse 3.x (I have to maintain it after all :-) The notion of an abstract command (as opposed to the Command class) has 2 interesting responsibilities:

Am I enabled?
Do something.

In 3.x, commands delegate them to the command's currently active handler. Two aspects of the 3.x implementation aren't quite right in my opinion.

Responsibility #1 is implemented as state (isEnabled()) on the Command itself. Because a command is a global singleton (it's supposed to represent the operation) this has the unintended side effect that a command is enabled or disabled globally for the application. The active handler determines the state, but based on whatever information it wants (which may or may not be the same information it will execute against).

Responsibility #2 is implemented in the handler's execute method. It can then use the execution event to get the IEvaluationContext and extract information out of it. This mostly works well, and you end up treating the IEvaluationContext as a map.

In e4 we're looking IEclipseContext "Contexts: the service broker" which provides a localized view into the application state (i.e. what you can see from your view or editor makes sense). Information relevant to the state of the application is stored in your context in 2 forms. Some information is identified by class (ECommandService.class.getName(), EventAdmin.class.getName()) and some information is identified by name (selection, activePart).

Now the fun part. In e4 a handler for a command can define 2 methods:

canExecute(*) - This will be called by the framework before trying to execute a command
execute(*) - This will be called by the framework when appropriate (can you guess what it does? :-)

But in e4 you don't need to extract your variables from your context, you can ask for them directly:


public boolean canExecute(
    @Named("selection") IStructuredSelection selection);
public void execute(
    @Named("selection") IStructuredSelection selection, 
    Shell shell);

When the framework needs to call either method, it will inject the needed information from the appropriate IEclipseContext. It uses the @Named annotation if it is present, or the type of the parameter (for example, Shell.class.getName()) if @Named is not.

In e4 1.0 we're adopting the JSR 330 annotations for injection (plus a few extras that we need). This is still a work in progress, but it's moving right along. If you are interested, now is the time to get involved - http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4.

There's a lot more to this story, so stay tuned for the next update.

PW

BioClipse: Align sequences with the Kalign Web service

Ola Spjuth — 2009-11-03T13:34:03+00:00

A recent feature addition to Bioclipse is the ability to align protein sequences using the Kalign Web service available from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Simply select two protein sequences in the Navigator (currently the FASTA format is only supported but more formats are in the pipe), right-click, and select Align > Align using Kalign.

This compiles the sequences into the input format that Kalign expects, and sends it via SOAP to the Kalign Web service at EBI. The results is stored as a file in the same folder as the aligned resources, and opened in the SequenceEditor (note the new Wrap feature available from the toolbar).

The feature is available from the latest development version of Bioclipse.

Goulwen Le Fur: Back from ESE 2009

Goulwen Le Fur — 2009-11-03T11:18:46+00:00

After a little break, I'm back ! :)

ESE 2009 was a very cool experience. An opportunity to meet very important people for the EEF project and to assist to very interesting presentations.

First of all, EMF, CDO, EMF Databinding tutorial was very interesting. It's a shame that we hadn't the time to do all the exercices.
In the afternoon the modeling symposium showed us some very interesting application of EMF. I found the demo of Cedric Vidal from ProxiAD especially interesting with the EMF customizer. This tools allows users to "customize" generated EMF models with a models using an Xtext syntax very close to CSS.

And that was all for the first day. A very nice diner in a typical German Restaurant and it was time to sleep a little.

The second day, after a first key note that let me quite unconvinced, it was time for talks. I assisted to many talks about e4 and the riena project then back to modeling talks. I went to the talk about the brigde between EMF and Oslo made by the AtlanMod/INRIA team. Finally, It was the talk of Cedric for Acceleo. What an amazing room ! Cedric made a very good talk and I was glad to see the audience impressed by the new Acceleo tooling.

The final day began with an interesting talk about Papyrus and the very very huge plan for the future. I saw that papyrus is on a good way and I'm happy they use EEF for this project. Final preparations and it was time for my talk. I'm quite satisfied of it. I had some good advice of people that assisted to my "sexy" talk. I finally went to the talk of Mariot about SWTBot, what an amazing technology ! EEF have a start of support for automated tests with SWTBot and I really think that finalize this part of EEF is one of the important job of EEF in 2009.

ESE is finished and now we have to improve EEF to come next year with very new powerful features !

Eclipse Enthusiasts Poznań: Small but usefull enhancements to StyledText

Christopher Daniel — 2009-11-03T10:27:38+00:00

The biggest problem with line indenting in StyledText was that only the first line was indented when word wrapping was enabled.
But right now this issue has been fixed by Felipe Heidrich.
See the snippet:
Can you see the difference between first and second paragraph? I think it will address many many issues that you had with text indentation.

The most important new API method is:


StyledText#setLineWrapIndent(int, int, int)

The patch was released into Eclipse 3.6 M4 stream, so you need to checkout SWT from HEAD to utilize this awesome functionality.

Regards,
Chris

Prakash G.R.: Eclipse Tips on Twitter !

Prakash G.R. — 2009-11-03T09:50:16+00:00

Get (a different set of) Eclipse Tips in twitter: @Eclipse_Tips. If you are still in the RSS reader era, get the feed here.

Frederic Madiot: Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

Fred Madiot — 2009-11-03T09:36:22+00:00

This year was my first attending ESE, and it was worth it !

The talks on modeling were very interesting (Xtext, EMFQuery, Papyrus, ...) and it was nice to meet the guys directly involved in the projects we are interested in.

The Cloudsmith team, for example, to discuss how we could use MoDisco on the B3 project to analyse plugins and create models of builds. Or André Dietisheim about our tests with CDO to manage models of large Java applications created with MoDisco. Nice also to talk with Kenn, Ed, Ralph and many others.

I had the chance to talk during both the Modeling Symposium (Tuesday) and a session dedicated to MoDisco (Thursday).

With my colleague Gabriel Barbier of Mia-Software, who presented the demo Thursday, we shown how to create fine-grained models from Java source code (based on a Java.ecore metamodel), and how to navigate through this model with the model browser we have developped. We put the focus on the customization and the extensibility of this browser by using queries.

You can dynamically change the icon, color, font ... of the instances of your models (by defining a UICustomization, stored in a EMF model), or add "virtual" types (not originally defined in your Ecore metamodel) with "virtual" properties and references (by defining a RoleSet, also stored in a EMF model). The query mechanism that we provide is generic : it allows integrating queries written in Java, EMFQuery, OCL, XPath or ATL.

We presented the 0.8 version which is still under development (planned for the end of 2009). But thanks to Nicolas Bros who have put the releng in place, it is possible to download an integration build.

The demos are online :
- Demo during the Modeling Symposium
- Demo during the MoDisco short talk

Chris Aniszczyk: Symbian, Nokia and Java

Chris Aniszczyk — 2009-11-03T02:03:52+00:00

Ok, as an Eclipse guy, I have to admit something, I sort of have a man crush on the Symbian Foundation.

From my experiences in the Eclipse and Gentoo communities, I see a lot of things Symbian is doing right to build an open source community. They are definitely putting a significant amount of resources behind the effort. However, that’s not the main point of this blog post and really a subject of another blog entry on building communities. My main point is that Nokia recently announced (thanks Gorkem) that they will be contributing their Java runtime to the Symbian Foundation…

At the BOF I also discussed of our contribution of our runtime code to Symbian Foundation. Basically the idea is that for Symbian^3 we plan to get all of our libraries code (except Web Services as it’s not Nokia owned code). Ken Walker from IBM talked of what they will provide on VM and core libraries level. They will provide J9 VM+CLDC/CDC/FP libraries in the binary release under an RND license. This means that developers will have a fully functional runtime from Symbian Foundation for java me applications as it appears in current S60 devices. Nokia plans to utilize EPL license for our contribution. Since many of the core libraries are already available in Apache Harmony there’s pretty good open source mobile java library set then available with business friendly OS licenses.

This is great news for mobile Java developers; I like when I see public roadmaps available.

From my point of view, it’s great to see some Java focus. Back in the day when mobile wasn’t hot, I did some mobile Java work with the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), I even helped write a book on the topic.

During that time, there were a lot of APIs lacking on the mobile devices which eRCP tried to solve along with giving mobile developers a reasonable modular user interface technology via OSGi. However, there wasn’t much interest at the time. Furthermore, there were challenges involving writing applications for mobile devices… it was just plain hard. The customization of the user interface was difficult… it was hard to theme applications… you couldn’t really use something like CSS at the time. My favorite problem was in regards to writing a reusable user interface across phones. For example, let’s pretend we were writing an expense tracking application for the Nokia 9500:

The first thing to notice is there’s a nice wide screen when the clam-shell is open. There’s a lot of things you can fit into your user interface when the phone is in that mode. Ok, now let’s pretend that the user closes the clam-shell so you have a smaller screen available. What does your application UI do? Do you present another view of your application, the same screen? Will everything fit? Who knows? Take this thinking a step further and imagine writing a reasonable reusable interface across phones like Nokia’s older s60 line… and so on…

Those were the days!

On a side note, this is one area I think Apple is brilliant in. Have you noticed that their mobile phones have had the same LCD size for a few generations? Have you ever thought why? In my opinion, it makes the life of a developer easier when it’s something you don’t even worry about. I predict that Apple will continue this pattern for awhile.

In the end, it’s exciting to see so much open source action in the mobile space, especially when my favorite license is involved… the Eclipse Public License.

Yves Yang: XWT Designer

Yves YANG — 2009-11-02T22:07:23+00:00

During the ESE 2009 last week, I have shown a demo with a WYSIWYG editor for XWT in e4 Symphosium and XWT session. It is a tool like VE of eclipse. But the architecture is completely different. XWT Designer relies on XML, instead of Java in VE. And also it doesn’t have two JVMs as VE.

In terms of features, XWT supports already all layouts and controls with Tabbed propertiew view. In summary, all feature of VE has been supported such as:
- Palette
- DnD
- Event
- Layout
- User-firendly Tabbed Properties View
- Tree View

And furthermore, it overcomes the limitations of VE by providing some tools for Data/Control Binding edition. And it is definitively designed for non-SWT programmer.

Soyatec has planned to contribute it as a subproject of VE. It takes some time to get in eclipse. But by now, you can already install it using the following URL with the last daily build (here) of e4 :
http://www.xwtdesigner.org/update

Any feedback and suggestion are welcome.

Gorkem Ercan: What else have been keeping us busy

gorkem — 2009-11-02T21:14:23+00:00

Nokia’s Java UIs team has been quite busy getting the eSWT port on Qt ready for the last 18 months, however what we have been working on has not been limited to eSWT port on Qt. We have been running a parallel project called OpenLCDUI. The goal of the project is to create an open source ready implementation of MIDP’s GUI toolkit (LCDUI) using eSWT.

Initially, the development is done using eSWT on Symbian while the rest of the team is getting the Qt port ready. As a result, OpenLCDUI is proven to be able to bring MIDP UI support to any platform that has eSWT. Since eSWT’s Qt port can run on any platform that Qt can the list of possible platforms is quite extensive. This implementation will be open sourced together with the rest of the S60 Java Runtime as mentioned here and will provide a cross-platform alternative to developing mobile Java UIs.

Nokia’s Java UI team also has some other interesting stuff cooking up that I will be posting about soon.

Eike Stepper: Less EMF!

Eike Stepper — 2009-11-02T19:52:43+00:00

This year's Eclipse summit was a great success, again. Before I start to chatter about the modeling technologies that I found most interesting, I'd like to point out that there also seems to be some sort of anti modeling coalition. It's clear that the public statement that "Modeling sucks!", without further reasoning, is more likely to create common hilarity than constructive engagement in the challenges and opportunities. A pity that I missed the Foundation 2.0 talk!

I noticed that others took the war against modeling and EMF in particular more seriously. There seems to be a whole industry concerned with devices that shield against EMF and the like. They are sold with the slogan "Less EMF", go figure:

http://www.lessemf.com

Of course these attempts to discredit the value of modeling are doomed to failure, as the overwhelming interest in Eclipse modeling technologies at the past summit demonstrated. The tutorial about Advanced Programming Techniques with EMF and CDO was so overly crowded that the organizers had to take all tables out of the room and make place for almost 100 attendees.

At least the same amount of interested persons stayed in that room to participate in the discussions of the following modeling symposium. All the other talks (24 total) and BOFs about modeling had been extremely well attended, too. Some of them were of particular interest for me and the CDO Model Repository project:

The new EMF Model Query provides an SQL-like query language, cool (Xtext-based?) tooling and an extensible query orchestration and interpretation framework. The SAP team announced that an integration with the CDO server side is very interesting.
Frederic Jouault and Hugo Bruneliere compared Eclipse modeling and Microsoft Oslo technologies and had some ideas how to bridge the two worlds and transform artifacts between both. They mentioned that Oslo misses a model repository.
Cedric Brun demonstrated the Acceleo generator tooling and gave insights to the process of bringing this project into Eclipse.org. The tooling looked so comfortable that I thought I should give generative approaches a new chance in the CDO code itself.
Kenn Hussey and Raphael Faudougave a BOF and a talk on Papyrus, the new integrated modeling environment at Eclipse.org. These ones were really interesting because some large companies announced that they want to participate in a general initiative with the goal of providing a commercial quality modeling tool with various diagramming support, queries, refectorings and a lot more. CDO was seen in the center of this new architecture to provide client-side scalability, model storage and collaboration.
Markus Herrmannsdoerfer gave a talk that I awaited for a long time already. It was about the COPE framework that seems to do a great job to assist with model evolution (they call it adaptation) and the subsequent instance data migration. Very interesting stuff! Many CDO users have asked for more support in this area and it's clear that we need to provide solutions in a world of changing businesses.
Hajo Eichler demonstrated his ideas on executable models. And he did that very well. Last not least because he copied major parts of my own slides. Sure, he asked for my permission, but because he also changed the copyright to his own's Ed announced that we might send the police after him. Two minutes later we could hear their alarms from outside and he got really worried. Poor Hajo!
Goulwen Le Fur gave an introduction to the new Extended Editing Framework project which is about generating "sexy" properties sheets and possibly object data entry forms. I really hope that they add support for reflective models soon, so that we can use this cool technology in our CDO Explorer UI.

Today it's exactly one year ago that I startet blogging and since that time I was allowed to realize how much positive impact a little marketing can have on a technology like CDO. Some of my friends startet a private competition in finding modeling talks at the summit with no mention of CDO. Not an easy task ;-)

I realize that these days more and more modelers are interested in a model repository, either for using it as a runtime platform for their own products or for storing their design time models. I'm glad that we, the CDO team, have forseen this interest and for the future I hope that we can have even more collaboration and consolidation with other efforts in this area:

Please work with us
on adding the cool features to CDO that you need!

Tonny Madsen: Learning more about Eclipse plug-in development...

Tonny Madsen — 2009-11-02T19:50:59+00:00

As part of the Eclipse Foundation Training series, there are scheduled 5 classes on "Advanced Eclipse RCP".

This is the perfect class for people, who have developed Eclipse plug-ins for the last year or so and now wants to know more about some of the more advanced subjects in Eclipse plug-in development.

The title of the classes is "Advanced RCP Eclipse", but with the exception of one subject, all the subjects of the class are just as relevant if you're developing Eclipse plug-ins for the IDE.

Amoung the subjects we will teach in the classes are:

Wizards - which is basically here because we don't have time for this subject during "Development in Eclipse RCP".
Long-Running operations and Jobs and how to make the interaction between these and the UI as painless as possible.
How to use Eclipse Adapters. While the Adapter framework arguably is one of the more difficult to understand and use properly, the is also a framework that will solve many of the problems you might face is larger non-trivial applications especially when used in conjunction with the menus extension point and handlers.
The Data Binding framework and how to use this to cut down on the boilerplate code in the application.
How to handle virtual trees and tables when either the amount of data is large or the retrieval time is long for items in the tree or table.
How to declare and implement your own extension points. Not that this is especially difficult, but there are a number of god design patterns around this that can help reduce the code involved and also make your application react properly when plug-ins are either added or removed from the running aplication.
How to do head less builds using PDEBuild, which probably is not of the most troublesome subjects in Eclipse. One day it works, then next it don't...

You can see the complete list of subjects in these classes and where to attend of the classes on the training page.

Although the page on the training says "Prerequisites: Solid Java experience, experience with Eclipse SDK as a Java development environment and notions of Eclipse RCP", I know from past experience that mere notions will make for very hard three days. In the classes we assume you know about commands, views, perspectives, etc - basically the subjects from the "Development in Eclipse RCP".

If you have been developing Eclipse plug-ins for some time, this just might be the next class for you...

Dave Carver: Eclipse Documentation on the Wiki

David Carver — 2009-11-02T19:29:36+00:00

A while ago Chris promoted the idea of single sourcing documentation from the wiki.

I followed up by helping to write the Documentation Guidelines.

Since then, there are a number of projects starting to use the wiki for their documentation.

If your project is using the wiki to write your documentation, consider adding it to the Draft Documentation category. Add the following markup to the bottom of any page you want included in the category:

[[Category:Draft Documentation]]

This will help provide a common place that users or contributors can find these pages, and help contribute changes to them.

Working on user or adoptors documentation is a great way that the community can help, and it's a very low entry point.

Kenn Hussey: On the Mo...

Kenn Hussey — 2009-11-02T18:37:24+00:00

Having witnessed, first-hand, the transformative effect that hair (or absence thereof) can have on our personal lives, I've decided to grow some hair, this time for a cause. That's right, it's Movember and I've joined the Eclipse Mommitters in their effort to raise money to "help change the face of men's health". I'll be posting pictures of my progress over the next few weeks on my "Mo Space" (personal page). Check it out, consider making a donation to our team, and think about how you could do your part to help fight prostate cancer.

Dave Carver: Making it Easy for Contributors to Contribute

David Carver — 2009-11-02T18:05:22+00:00

Bjorn had a blog post where he states "Eclipse needs to be more Welcoming" in many ways I agree with this statement. I've blogged in the past on how I see some differences with some commercial open source projects and more traditional open source projects. In some ways, I think the emphasis on commercial is both a benefit and deterrent to eclipse related projects. There is a different mentality at times that develops when one is not being paid by somebody to work on an open source project.

Anyways, one of the great non-commercial open source eclipse projects that has been developed by one person's passion, is the Athena Common Builder. It opens a wide variety of ways that an eclipse project can become more open to its contributors. One of Bjorn's statements points out that there needs to be an easy way to get the latest source. There is but not many projects have this item up to date or published: Team Project Sets.

With Athena Common Builder in use, there is no reason that a project shouldn't have a Team Project Set for their builds. It is as simple as adding map2psf in your build.properties file. Add it to your build targets to run, and it will create the necessary PSF in your releng project. You just then have to make this available. The nice thing about this, your PSF will always be up to date with what your MAP file says. So as long as you keep your MAP files current and clean, the PSF will be available.

Then it's just a matter of a contributor, going to File->Import->Team->Team Project Set and importing the PSF for your project.

Making it easy for contributors to at least get the most current code, is critical to your project's growth. If you do not make it easy to at least get the code, then you are already starting at a disadvantage in growing your community contributions.

David Green: Movember!

David Green — 2009-11-02T17:19:24+00:00

Normally my wife would pay me to shave it off... now I've found the best excuse ever to grow a Mo! I'm growing a Mo to raise money and awareness for Prostate Cancer Canada. Now to decide.... what'll it be?

Please donate, or better yet sign up and start raising too! Want to find out more? Check out the official Movember site.

Moritz Post: Extending Google Wave

Moritz Post — 2009-11-02T14:22:27+00:00

A few days ago i gave Google Wave a spin. I was already quite familiar with the conversation features and thought it was time to extend the wave by some custom functionality. I therefore created a robot extension to enrich a wave conversation with some additional functionality. The idea was to fetch details about an eclipse bugzilla bug when a bug is referenced in a wave conversation. To see how that works check out the screencast below (click the image).

The development of the robot was rather straight forward. The robot itself is deployed on the google appengine and communicates with the wave via HTTP REST calls and uses JSON as its language dialect. The communication was encapsulated in a client library which did have some bugs though. Working with the app engine was a joy i must add. Deployment and management of the application was quite cool. Fetching the bugzilla data was also easy as it is able to spill out bug details in XML format.

All in all i am very excited to see how easy it is to provide additional wave capabilities and am hopping that the wave will make its way into every days life. Also the appengine gets a thumbs up from me (at least for such simple tasks as this wave robot). You can fetch the source of the robot project here.

Ian Skerrett: Happy Birthday Apache

Ian Skerrett — 2009-11-02T14:16:14+00:00

This week the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is celebrating its 10th birthday at their ApacheCon conference. ASF has been a pioneer and leader in the open source community. When the Eclipse Foundation was first created, ASF was a source and inspiration for many of the Foundation’s principles (transparency, meritocracy) and structures (PMC, committers). I continue to have a tremendous amount of respect for ASF’s individual-centric approach towards open source development and the fact they operate such a large influential organization with volunteers. They are clearly an important force in the greater open source community.

This week we have added an Apache birthday greeting to the eclipse.org banner. I hope you will join me in ‘raising a glass’ to wish Apache Happy 10th birthday.

Bjorn Freeman-Benson: Eclipse Needs To Be More Welcoming

Bjorn Freeman-Benson — 2009-11-02T09:00:07+00:00

Eclipse needs to be more welcoming to contributors. I've written about this in the past [1,2,3,4,5] and even suggested some ideas about how Eclipse could improve [6,7,8,9]. And yet there's been no major change: it's still just as difficult to contribute. There's no easy way to get started, no easy way to get the code and build it yourself, ... So when I saw how easy IntelliJ makes it, I felt embarrassed on behalf of the Eclipse Foundation:

The IntelliJ home page gives equals time to "Download" and "Contribute". The Eclipse home page strongly emphasizes "Download" and doesn't even have the word "contribute" - not anywhere.
The IntelliJ contribution page (1 click from the home page) lists all sorts of ways that you can contribute to the community from the easiest all the way through becoming a committer.
It even has a prominent How to Check Out and Build page, and the process is two simple steps: (a) git, (b) ant. Period. (With Eclipse... well first you have to find the documentation, then it goes on and on, and it even admits the "documentation [falls] short in on some specifics".)

Which IDE is more inviting to contributions?

Eclipse Enthusiasts Poznań: Helios Staging Repository

Christopher Daniel — 2009-11-02T08:52:44+00:00

If you work with Eclipse 3.6 dev stream and you need to install various additional tools/frameworks (like Mylyn, EMF or WTP) and you are fed up with googling for particular update sites you can use Helios Staging Repository (http://download.eclipse.org/releases/staging).

Well, it allowed my to set up my new shiny M3 in 10 minutes.

Ian Bull: Mo, Mo, Mo, Movember

Ian Bull — 2009-11-02T04:24:52+00:00

What started out as a crazy idea on Friday afternoon, with a little encouragement from Kevin Barnes, is starting to take off. We now have an Official Eclipse Mommitter team -- a team of Eclipse contributors who plan on growing Mustaches during the month of Movember to raise awareness (and funds) for men's health issues.

But if you're reading this blog it means you're interested in Eclipse and you are encouraged to join the team. In fact, I would like to put a challenge out there: let's try and get 20 people to join the Eclipse Mommitters (no voting needed). Considering there are close to 1,000 committers, 20 people is only 2% of that population. Considering the release train is known to have a few million users, that's less than 0.002%! It would also be cool to get at least one committer from each top level project. (And someone from the Foundation too).

Since November has already started (it's likely November 2nd when your reading this) we have to act quick. There are a few things you must do:

Checkout www.movember.com
Join the team: http://www.movember.com/register/44681. If the link doesn't work, search www.movember.com for the team Eclipse Mommitters
Run home and shave (no head starts)
Start raising a few bucks and a ton of awareness

Our awesome Eclipse Release Engineers are considering using our Mommitters logo during one of the integration builds to help raise awareness too -- You could be part of Eclipse history!

No doubt you have a few questions, so here are answers to some of the more common questions:

What is Movember?

Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men's health.

At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants, known as Mo Bros, have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their Mo, raising money along the way to benefit men's health. -- In Canada we are raising funds for prostate cancer, however, different countries are raising funds for local charities related to men's health.

How can women get involved?
While growing a Mo is left to the guys, Mo Sistas do a lot of important work for Movember. Mo Sistas can get involved by:

Registering online, recruiting a team and raising money
Organising events like Mo Parties
Making a donation to a Mo Bro
Supporting and showing love for the Mo

I already have a Mo - how can I participate?
If you already have a Mo you can do a ‘reverse Movember’ and have people donate to you to shave it off. Alternatively, you could shave off your moustache at the start of Movember and then re-grow your Mo throughout the month…. Maybe it’s time to try a new Mo style?

Are goatees or beards allowed?
The definition of a Moustache:

There is to be no joining of the Mo to side burns – That’s a beard.
There is to be no joining of the handlebars – That’s a goatee.
A small complimentary growth under the bottom lip is allowed (aka a tickler).

Remember, it’s Movember, not ‘Beardvember’ or ‘Goateevember’

Elias Volanakis: Eclipse 3.6 M3 (Helios) available for download

2009-11-02T03:59:18+00:00

Milestone #3 for Eclipse 3.6 is now available for download.

Here are the noteworthy changes up this milestone:

My favorite change is the new support for software installation while running & debugging. This should be a huge time-saver for all developers who are adding p2 support to their RCP apps. It permits to do install operations in a launched application. Previously this was only possible after regularly deploying the RCP application via the export wizard.

Pascal Rapicault: p2 is going public

Le ScaL — 2009-11-01T19:58:00+00:00

I mean API public. Therefore we are soliciting input from people who have been using our provisional API or people that are looking into using it. To do so, please open a bug report capturing your use cases as well as stating the problems you have been experiencing with the current provisional API. Thanks in advance.

Yves Yang: XWT - Data Trigger (2)

Yves YANG — 2009-11-01T15:35:38+00:00

In the previous post, I have shown up the Trigger, which is in fact a Control Trigger. The source of Trigger is a UI Control such as Button. It looks like Control Binding, but it is a little bit different in features. Control binding is used to synchronize the state of the two controls. It is always bidirectinal and one to one property synchronization. Trigger is one direction from source to target, and it supports the property binding of 1 to N, N to 1 and also N to N .

This post will deal with Data Trigger. The source of Trigger is data context of UI control instead of UI Control it-self. Like Trigger, Data Trigger has also two implementation classes, one for the simple case and another for the complexe one:

DataTrigger
MultiDataTrigger

DataTrigger

A DataTrigger allows you to set property values when a property value of the data object matches a specified Value. For example, if you are displaying a list of Employee objects, you may want the foreground color of the name to be different based on each Employee’s current attendance: employees who are currently on vacation are displayed with a purple foreground.

<Label>
  <Label.triggers>
    <DataTrigger binding="{Binding path=attendance}" value="inVacation" >
      <Setter property="foreground" value="Purple"/>	 </DataTrigger>
  </Label.triggers>
</Label>

MultiDataTrigger

A MultiDataTrigger object is similar to a MultiTrigger, except the conditions of a MultiDataTrigger are based on property values of bound data instead of those of a UI Control. In a MultiDataTrigger, a condition is met when the property value of the data item matches the specified Value. You can then use setters to apply changes when all conditions are met.

Using the same example above, we can add a new condition like location is in France.

<Label>
  <Label.triggers>
     <MultiDataTrigger>
        <MultiDataTrigger.conditions>
          <Condition binding="{Binding path=attendance}" value="inVacation"/>
          <Condition binding="{Binding path=location}" value="France" />
        </MultiDataTrigger.conditions>
        <Setter property="foreground" value="Purple"/>
     </MultiDataTrigger>
  </Label.triggers>
</Label>

Another trigger we have not talked about is EventTrigger. The source of EventTrigger is an event of UI Control. This trigger is mainly used with graphic animation. It will be supported later.

Ian Bull: Come on Eclipse, let’s grow a Mo

Ian Bull — 2009-10-31T03:53:22+00:00

As most of you know October is coming to an end. This means that M3 is due out soon, ESE is over, and the very early EclipseCon registration deadline is approaching. It also means that Movember is starting. Movember is a month dedicated to changing the face of men’s health, and it’s all about the Mo (the Mustache). This year I thought we could try and get an Eclipse team together to help with this worthy cause.

So, if you’re part of the Eclipse Community — an Eclipse Committer, a Eclipse Contributor, a active user — you are encouraged to join the Eclipse Mommitters (Eclipse Committers with a Mo), help raise awareness of Prostate Cancer, and grow a killer mustache.

1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.

This is not just for the gentlemen either. Ladies, you are welcome to join as Mo Sista, a woman who loves a Mo. You can join the Eclipse team at the following URL: http://ca.movember.com/register/44681 . Hey, maybe we can all keep our Mo’s until EclipseCon and get a group picture . (I’m just kidding).

Kevin Barnes: Eclipse Mommitters for Prostate Cancer

Kevin Barnes — 2009-10-31T03:29:18+00:00

Ian Bull has started a Movember team for Eclipse Committers. We’re going to be growing moustaches next month and trying to raise some money for Prostate Cancer Canada.Prostate Cancer affects 1 in 6 men in their lifetime and is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.

Any Eclipse Committer can join our team. To join Eclipse Mommitters go to http://ca.movember.com/register/44681

Once registered you’ll be sent all the information needed to get donations and get growing as part of my Movember team.

If you aren’t interested in participating in Movember, please consider pledging a few dollar in support.

To make a donation, you can either:

• Click this link https://www.movember.com/ca/donate/your-details/team_id/44681/ and donate to the Mommitters team online using your credit card or PayPal account , or

• Write a cheque payable to ‘Prostate Cancer Canada’, referencing my Registration Number 223281 and mailing it to: Prostate Cancer Canada, 145 Front Street East, Ste. 306, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3, Canada.

Learn more about Movember by watching the Intro Video at http://ca.movember.com

Erwin Tenhumberg: How to Consume an Inbound Backend Web Service in NWDS/Jboss environment

Abdelmorhit El Rhazi — 2009-10-30T20:40:00+00:00

The web services provided by SAP systems might be consumed in non SAP platform (Jboss, IBM Websphere ...). This weblog shows all steps which are required to consume a web service provided by a SAP backend system. The client is generated in Netweaver Developer Studio (NWDS). The project is deployed and tested in Jboss platform.

Litrik De Roy: Problems with Eclipse buttons in Ubuntu 9.10

litrik — 2009-10-30T13:44:44+00:00

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some buttons no longer work in Eclipse 3.5. Clicking has no effect but keyboard shortcuts still work.

It looks like Eclipse is doing some ~~nasty stuff~~ advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3.5):

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse

Tom Schindl: ESE 09 – My Slides

tomeclipsedev — 2009-10-30T12:30:24+00:00

Back from ESE 09 – once more a nice event and got to know even more people. I was quite busy this year taking part in 5 Sessions so a short review from my side:

EMF Tutorial

I think Ed, Eike and me did a good job though there’ve been too many people so working through examples was not possible. The next time (EclipseCon 09) we need probably skip some parts. Beside that I think I could demostrate fairly good how flexible Eclipse-Databinding can be used in RCP-Applications.

E4 Symposia

Boris and me had many people in our symposia and I think we could explain those people our vision of e4 and how the internals are structured. Boris gave a short overview about the 20 things, how DI is working using the IEclipseContext and WebUI and I talked about our EMF-driven Application model and our flexible rendering story.
I think people start to get our point that E4 is a flexible Application Framework they can build any UI-Application (the UI technology doesn’t really matter) if you start accepting that rendering is just another service like it is the selection, logging, … service.

What’s in E4

This was an overview talk given by Boris, Kai, Hallvard, Yves and me on e4. I gave a short overview about the reasoning and how the application platform is designed around our EMF-Model. I think we could at least reduce the confusion in the community.

e4 in Detail – The model workbench and it’s possibilities

In this talk I tried to explain in more detail how the e4-application platform uses EMF, DI and the rendering services to create a flexible UI-Application. The slides are available here.

UFaceKit – A uniform UI development model for different UI and Runtime platforms

This was my last talk where I explain the reasons and various cool things you can with UFaceKit which since a week before can be optionally backed up by an Ecore-Model so that Application can developed (and of needed deployed) using EMF-Technologies. The slides are here.

Ed Merks: Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: The Final Day

Ed Merks — 2009-10-30T11:45:32+00:00

The day started with Tony Ballenti's keynote about the dynamics of open source.

He explored the various reasons why organizations get involved in open source and how that motivation matures over time.

As with all things in life, investing more effort generally generates more reward, or at least the potential for that. Nevertheless, many if not most are quite comfortable investing very little while still reaping significant rewards. Tony spent a lot of time talking about ecosystems with these takeaways.

From a modeling perspective, we've gained a great deal of value from innovative individuals including many researchers. In addition, a significant number of companies have grown in this space and are investing heavily in it, which is very good if you consider where we'd be if we still relied primarily on the two large organizations that kicked off this venture.

After the break, during which I talked with Bernd, Boris, and Kai about using Xtext to specify a CSS subset for e4 styling, was Kenn Hussey, Raphael Faudou, and Patrick Tessier's Papayrus talk.

The room was way overcrowded and there just wasn't enough air. They outlined the history of the project, i.e., they started as a number of separate external UML tool efforts. These efforts merged under the Papyrus 2 umbrella which is now producing some very slick looking technology. Kenn described the "perfect storm" that's bringing things together.

The project aims to separate out a DSL backbone that can be reused with other models such as SysML, BPMN2, and so on. Stay tuned for other developments in the area of a common DSL workbench...

Markus Herrmannsdoerfer's COPE talk was in the same room and it was even more crowded, so much so that people just couldn't fit in the room anymore.

I assume many people have data that needs to be migrated as their models change. Go figure. The idea behind Cope is to track the changes made to the Ecore model and then apply those same operations to the actual instance data. He demonstrated how it really works with a simple state machine model.

Hajo Eichler's Model Execution Framework talk was also in the same room.

Thank goodness someone figured out how to open a window or I'd have died by now. He did a bit of slide "borrowing" for his talk; Eike and I made it clear intend to send the license police after him. Quickly thereafter, you could hear the police sirens out in the street, and he looked worried. He showed how he extended the Ecore model to be able to express behavior using a subset of UML activities. There's an intepretter to execute the model as well as a debugger for interactively tracking the execution process. It looks very promising.

After that was lunch, during which Thomas, Henrik and I talked with Wayne about how we can help with aggregating p2 repositories for Helios and for projects not on the release train. Unfortunately, I missed all the afternoon sessions dealing with modeling project management issues. If I told you about them, I'd have to kill you. I really wanted to see EuGENia;I heard from others that it was really cool. I also wanted to see the progress that was made on EEF. It was a bit of a bummer to miss all the interesting sessions that afternoon. There should be more time for chatting at these conferences...

By late afternoon, word had gotten out that it was my birthday. During the closing session, Ralph incited the entire audience to sing happy birthday for me. How embarrassing is that? According to German custom, I should have bought cake for everyone and invited them all to a party. Sorry dudes, I can't afford that much cake. As expected, ESE just keeps getting better each year and I look forward to next year.

Jan Kohnlein: Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 retrospective

Jan Köhnlein — 2009-10-30T10:00:55+00:00

Attending Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 once again felt like a big family meeting. It is always a pleasure to meet people you usually only correspond with electronically in person. The organization was once again almost perfect and the food excellent. Thanks a lot to the organizers and sponsors!

We had a very productive project meeting for the EMF Index project, clarifying a lot of critical points and further aligning the efforts and requirements of the involved parties.

Markus, Sebastian, Karsten and me were impressed by the large number of about 50 participants in our workshop on Domain-specific Languages with Eclipse Modeling. The slides are now online at slideshare, just in case you're interested. With such an audience it was of course a little bit difficult to make it a real hands-on experience, but I think we at least managed to leave a good impression on the presented toolchain.

Jos's and my talk on Combining text and graphics in modeling tools was also well attended, and from the quality of questions that were asked I guess our message has been understood. The slides are also available at slideshare.

Apart from a number of really impressive talks, the thing that most impressed me was SAP's graphical editing framework. Instead of using a code-generation approach it rather focusses on an provider-based Java API. They are currently in the process of adapting it to EMF and their plan is to make it open source. I hope they really do, because it seems to have the potential of greatly reducing the complexity of creating graphical editors.

Bob Balfe: Why GWT is a great concept.

Bob Balfe — 2009-10-30T09:58:25+00:00

One of the most powerful aspects of tools, samples, templates, etc is the fact that most developers learn by example. So while the last post I put here (Is GWT the future of web development?) went viral on the internet and you heard many rebuttals, affirmations, and other comments, there is one fact that remains - GWT is a very cool technology that “hides” a lot of the complexities of creating state-full web applications that implement Web 2.0 functionality. It also does another thing, it gives Java developers a bridge over to JavaScript/HTML programming. By writing Java (which the developer is very familiar with) and outputting a Web 2.0 application it immediately gives the Java developer a one-to-one relationship - or at least GWT’s interpretation.

I think of compilers and tools like this as a point in time technology. It will be great in the beginning but in the end the developer will rarely “compile” the web application and possibly just edit the output directly - or rewrite it from scratch. The problem I see is the steep learning curve so the latter part of that statement may be a while.

I relate things like this to MFC, MFC was great for C/C++ developers but once you learned what MFC did under the covers for the most part many just went around MFC and removed the bloat.

So if Google and the open source community do this right, GWT may stay around for quite a while. If it ends up creating “bloaded” applications then I think in the end it will not survive.

Lastly, it looks like this approach is gaining popularity. From the comments there were a couple of open source projects and even a commercial project Vaadin that essentially do the same thing.

technorati tags: Compilers, GWT

Peter Kriens: Complete

Peter Kriens — 2009-10-30T08:40:32+00:00

Every time when a new industry joins OSGi there is a lot of new people entering the specification work. These people, inevitably, bring their their own culture. Mixing cultures is not always without its problems. Having lived and worked in Holland, Sweden, and France I learned the hard way that moving to another culture can be a tricky thing; it does take some time before you realize that your absolute truth is not really shared by your new countrymen.

So the Enterprise experts bring their prevailing culture. With respect to standards, this culture is heavily influenced by JCP, specifically JEE, and the way things work in the open source world. This is not always aligned with the way OSGi has been run so far. Previous OSGi specs have always been rather rather thoroughly reviewed and picked apart. A running joke in the Alliance is that we start with a telegraph pole but we we end up with a tooth pick. But what a tooth pick!

One of the key things I always liked about the final OSGi specs is that they are complete. Virtually all service specifications and framework specification thoroughly specify edge cases, are fully introspective and provide relevant events to track what is happening inside the service. In JEE vendors have much more freedom. For example, in JEE the deployment aspects are left as an implementation detail. This completeness of OSGi specs is demonstrated by the fact that (so far) all our specs were able to run from a single test framework while only requiring vendors to have their to be tested bundles installed. It is possible to define do the test setup in the test case because the specifications are sufficiently complete. For example, we can deploy a bundle in a framework without having to know the vendor of that framework.

However, some of the EEG members complain we're too specific and do not allow enough space for implementations to do it their way. By giving more leeway to implementations, you allow more innovation and vendors can more easily fit existing products under a specification. These are not invalid arguments.

So I am struggling a bit with this issue. One of my primary roles in the OSGi Alliance is to guard the consistency between the specifications. This causes me sometimes to feel that I am fighting the whole group to guard this consistency. Despite the fact that I am really trying to run the fine line between being conservative and enabling new groups to do it their way. However, the hardest part is that I continuously have to challenge my own beliefs to try to see their point of view. Well, that is what mixing cultures does to you ...

Peter Kriens

Denis & Karl: The Commits Dashboard is Happier

Karl Matthias — 2009-10-29T23:41:07+00:00

The Commits Explorer is now living on one of our AMD machines and is much faster and responsive. The old vserver has been retired due to disk size limitations. This should improve the project summary pages on the main site as well since the activity meter and information about which companies and committers are active all comes from Dash. It took me the better part of a week to get it up and running after the old machine died, so apologies to anyone who felt slighted by being shown as ‘Inactive’ during that time. Everything is back to normal and faster than ever!

Bob Balfe: Who are your top referrers?

Bob Balfe — 2009-10-29T19:44:31+00:00

I check this stuff every so often.

I always find it interesting who are the top referrers for Balfes.net. It looks like most of my hits are from Planet Eclipse, DZone (which is new to me), and Planet Lotus but I also find it interesting how many readers access the feed directly from Google Reader.

#	Hits	Referrer

1	9198	http://www.planeteclipse.org/planet/
2	5748	http://planeteclipse.org/planet/
3	2208	http://www.google.com/reader/view/
4	1700	http://planet.eclipse.org/planet/
5	1037	http://www.dzone.com/
6	710	http://images.google.com/imgres
7	658	http://planetlotus.org/

technorati tags: hits, referrer

Ian Skerrett: Who Was at Eclipse Summit Europe?

Ian Skerrett — 2009-10-29T16:23:35+00:00

Each year we ask the attendees of Eclipse Summit Europe some questions about themselves. It gives us some insight into who is actually attending the conference. Here are some of the results.

1. Where do people live?

Not surprisingly, a lot of the ESE attendees are from Germany; in total 57% of the attendees resides in Germany but 24 other countries are represented. In addition to Germany France, Switzerland, US, Canada, Netherlands and Austria have more than 10 attendees at ESE.

2. Years of experience using Eclipse?

Over 60% of the ESE attendees have been using Eclipse for more than 3 years. Not terribly surprising considering the maturity of Eclipse.

3. How does your company use Eclipse?

Just over half (51%) of attendees were building internal or commercial applications based on Eclipse. From talking to people, I know lots of people are using Eclipse modeling, RCP, Equinox and other Eclipse technology for building their applications.

4. What is your role in your company?

No great surprise that the ESE attendees are very technical, 67% identified themselves as being a developer or architect.

5. What Eclipse projects are you using?

Europeans love their models and EMF is their choice of technology. EMF was a close second to JDT as being the most popular project. Equinox and RCP also had very strong use amongst the ESE attendees.

Project	Total
JDT	171
EMF	163
Equinox	142
RCP	136
Subversive	122
Mylyn	98
GEF	82
WTP Web Tools	75
Other Modeling Projects	71
GMF	69
PDT	56
WTP Java EE Tools	47
BIRT	45
Other Eclipse Project (please specifiy below)	35
CDT	30
TPTP	27
EclipseLink	26
Target Management	23
SOA Tools Project	17
DTP	13
VE	10
Riena	9
Mobile Tools for Java	8
DLTK	6

One thing I really enjoy about ESE is the people. I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.

Mike Milinkovich: This Week’s Announcements

Mike Milinkovich — 2009-10-29T14:54:39+00:00

Hearty congratulations are due to Microsoft, Soyatec and Tasktop for their announcements yesterday regarding Eclipse and Silverlight, Azure and Windows 7. It is great to see Microsoft providing support to the ecosystem to ensure Eclipse remains a great development environment for the Windows platform (which still represents almost 80% of our users on any given day).

Much of this progress results from work led by Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft. Vijay has been working closely with the Eclipse Foundation since just before EclipseCon 2009 and we’re very happy with the progress we’ve made.

Chris Aniszczyk: Slides from Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

Chris Aniszczyk — 2009-10-29T14:10:17+00:00

Yesterday, Paul Vanderlei and I gave a presentation about OSGi Versioning and Testing at Eclipse Summit Europe 2009.

Some people have asked for the slides, so I put them on slideshare.

Enjoy.

Lars Vogel: JavaScript in the SWT Browser widget

Lars Vogel — 2009-10-29T13:14:49+00:00

At the Eclipse Summit Europe I listened to a talk of Boris Bokowski about Eclipse and the Web.

Among other things I learned that you can execute JavaScript directly on the SWT Browser Widget and I wanted to give a tiny example for this.

This Eclipse view will for example load my webpage and then execute a tiny JavaScript (alert(”1″);) in the browser.

package de.vogella.swtbrowser;

import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;
import org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser;
import org.eclipse.swt.browser.ProgressEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.browser.ProgressListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;
import org.eclipse.ui.part.ViewPart;

public class View extends ViewPart {

	public static final String ID = "de.vogella.swtbrowser.view";

	public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
		final Browser b = new Browser(parent, SWT.NONE);
		b.setUrl("www.vogella.de");
		b.addProgressListener(new ProgressListener() {
			@Override
			public void completed(ProgressEvent event) {
				System.out.println("Page loaded");
				System.out.println(b.execute("alert(\"1\");"));
			}
			@Override
			public void changed(ProgressEvent event) {
			}
		});
	}

	/**
	 * Passing the focus request to the viewer's control.
	 */
	public void setFocus() {
	}
}

Thanks to Boris for the great talk.

Denis & Karl: Friends paying friends for helping friends

Denis Roy — 2009-10-29T13:10:36+00:00

You don’t need to pay your friendly Webmaster for saving your butt… But the funds will be put to good use (no, not drinks…) BTW, bug 292476 was initially called “Oops, I’m a dumbass!”

Bjorn Freeman-Benson: Self Serving Equals Goodness

Bjorn Freeman-Benson — 2009-10-29T11:00:03+00:00

I enjoy reading How Software Is Built by Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell. I was reading their recent interview with Con Zymari and found this excellent quote:

That’s the whole point of open source: everybody gets to be completely self serving and in the process of being self serving, they build this great thing that everybody gets to use.

I like the analogy, but I think you need to have a solid core before it can work this way. Someone needs to build the core so that all those self-serving companies can be self-serving and, by accident, improve the whole system. In Linux, that core is done by Linus and the Linux Foundation. At Eclipse, that core is done by ... um ... IBM was doing it, but IBM is doing less and less, so... who's doing the core now?

I think the Foundation should be doing the core: paid developers, working for the Foundation, solving the Tragedy of the Commons issues. Then each member company could be selfishly solving its own problems and the whole system would get better for everyone. That's the best way to ensure the future health of the platform we all love and use.

Ivar Meikas: Eclipse starting to use Git repositories

imeikas — 2009-10-29T09:59:35+00:00

It’s nice to see Eclipse starting to support Git, CVS is so 90’s.

There are quite many read only repos available already. Denis & Karl write a bit more in http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/eclipsewebmaster/2009/10/28/git-repos-at-eclipse/

Sven Efftinge: Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

Sven Efftinge — 2009-10-29T07:52:24+00:00

This year's Eclipse Summit Europe is again a very nice happening. It's so important to meet all the people you're chatting and mailing with in person.
Yesterday, Sebastian and I had the chance to demo some of the new Xtext features we've been working on in the Helios train. It was much fun and we got very positive feedback for both the talk and (more important) the features. We'll post the demos to our blogs very soon.

I'm especially excited about how well Xtext is accepted within the Eclipse Community. Yesterday there were at least three talks about other projects which make use of Xtext:

The b3 guys are working on a DSL to describe builds
In the new EMF Search implementation the query language is implemented with Xtext
The Relax NG tools are as well implemented in Xtext

How about e4? Designing UIs works good in a WYSIWYG style, but there are scenarios where you want to program parts of it. In addition storing the UI descriptions in XMI is not necessarily the best option. You cannot read it and it's very hard to diff and merge them. I can imagine that a programmer friendly textual syntax might please the modeling skeptics a bit. We can still use a WYSIWYS editor on top.

Implementing the CSS functionality with Xtext could be another opportunity to get more for less. To find out, I'll have to attend Kai's talk about the CSS customization in e4 this morning.
There are lots of other interesting sessions to attend today. Unfortunately I have to decide between listening to

Sebastian Benz (BMW) who talks about how Xtext is applied in the automotive industry (AUTOSAR) and
Jan Koehnlein and Jos Warmer who talk about how to combine Xtext and GMF

because they are both scheduled for 14:40.

Eclipse Enthusiasts Poznań: Eclipse e4 - getting started - dependency injection reading

Christopher Daniel — 2009-10-29T06:47:34+00:00

Eclipse e4 right now is almost the synonym of the word "future".

If you look for an excellent presentation that will bring you into the future, you can find it here (made by Tom Schindl).

Reading JSR 330 is also a good idea, because it will give you the basic understanding of Dependency Injection.

The last, but not least, is looking at org.eclipse.e4.core.services.context.IEclipseContext javadoc, and then, in the end, at org.eclipse.e4.workbench.ui.internal.Workbench.

All those readings will give you fair understanding of how dependency injection is used in e4.

Ed Merks: Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: A Day of Talks

Ed Merks — 2009-10-29T06:16:14+00:00

The morning started with the keynote about functional programming by Don Syme of Microsoft.

I loved functional programming back in my university days, which seems like so many eons ago. He argues that certain classes of problem are far simpler to solve using functional programming and shows a number of examples where F#'s syntax is far simpler, i.e., less verbose, than C#. Personally though, I'm not one who easily buys into the idea that syntactic conciseness in and of itself makes a language significantly better. Simplicity of the underlying semantic/mental model is ultimately what counts, and that of course needs to be balanced against expressiveness power, which generally is the counter point to simplicity. F# definitely looks powerful.

The break was an opportunity for many interesting discussions. One of the great things about conferences is the face to face discussions they facilitate. The summit is particularly conducive to that type of interation. Unfortunately that resulted in missing the start of the e4 talk. The diverse e4 team has made a lot of progress.

After another yummy lunch I was torn between Sven's Xtext talk and Tom's e4 model talk. Two cool things at once. Darn! I know more about Xtext than the e4 model, so I opted for the latter. It was interesting hearing all Tom's reasons for using EMF in e4.

He showed how a simple application model specifies the logical structure of the user interface, eliminating the need to build up these structures with a pile of boilerplate Java code. Then he showed how to extend that base scaffolding with embedded parts. He even showed an example where one process is editing an e4 model stored in a CDO repository while another process is rendering that same model from the shared repository in the actual UI; changes are immediately reflected across the process boundary effecitvely giving you a WYSIWYG editor. He also explained how you can define your own renderer to display the same model in various different ways. It's looking very good!

After that I attended Bernd Kolb and Christian Mohr's query talk.

Bernd explained some of the shortcomings of the existing EMF query technology; it's definitely pretty crude. SAP had some existing query infrastructure that was part of their proprietary MOF implementation; that's what's being contributed to Eclipse. They demonstrated examples of the cool SQL-like query language they support. The query execution engine makes use of the EMF index project, but can work against in memory resources as well as directly against a database too.

Frederic Jouault and Hugo Bruneliere's EMF Oslo talk was next.

They explained that M consistst of three complementary languages: MSchema, MGraph, and MGrammer, analogous to Ecore, EObject, and Xtext. Bridging these technologies involves mapping these specific concepts. To start one could define an Ecore model for MSchema so that it's possible to transform Ecore instances to MSchema instances which could then be serialized to conform of the MSchema textual syntax. They demonstrate their progress toward implementing this approach including ATL transformations for doing the mapping.

Henrik Lindberg and Thomas Hallgren's b3 talk followed a short break.

One might summarize the approach as model driven builds. Key aspects of the build and provisioning process are captured as declarative models, e.g., buildable units which are analogous to p2's installable units, and these ultimately drive the build process. Xtext is being used to provide human readable syntax for the build models. There's a lot of cool stuff planned! If you're working on an Eclipse project, you're probably painfully aware of how much of a nightmare it currently is to set up and maintain your builds. Goodness forbid someone changes the requirements for what needs to be pumped out at the end!

After that I had a chance to chat with a guy hoping to get involved in GEF, a project that certainly needs some fresh and lively committers. Maybe I'll be able to help. This was followed by the Buckminster talk from Henrik, Thomas, and Filip Hrbek.

It attracted a very large audience.

Henrik explained that provisioning a workspace or building a p2 repository ought to be as simple as ordering your favorite burger at your burger outlet of choice.

Filip and Thomas demonstrated that it's as simple as specifying a query to locate the root feature and asking for its p2 repository to be built.

The tools, e.g., the dependency visualizer, are looking very slick. They also demonstrated the repository aggregator, which is based on an EMF model and an EMF generated editor. It can even produce a Maven repository as well as a p2 repository. How cool is that? At the end they explained how the lessons learned from building Buckminster will be used to drive further improvements into the b3 project. Models, models, everywhere.

This was followed by the reception. It included a talk by Microsoft that felt a little too much like advertisement to me. Oh well, they paid for the the food and the spirits---the salmon was excellent and so was the wine---so it was a reasonable trade-off. I finished the day at a birds of a feather session discussing how to transform the modeling project into something suited for supporting a DSL workbench as well as how interested consumers could help fund that effort. It was a very interesting day indeed!

Denis & Karl: git repos at Eclipse!

Denis Roy — 2009-10-28T20:36:09+00:00

I’m in the process of setting up read-only git repositories of Eclipse CVS projects. You can see the list on this temporary page, and you should be able to use all the repos listed.

Feel free to read (and comment) on bug 280583.

Bernd Kolb: Next Generation Model Query

Bernd — 2009-10-28T19:44:45+00:00

Today I gave a talk on the next generation EMF Model Query together with my colleague Christian Mohr. It was well attended and we got some really good feedback.

The EMF Model Query deals with finding EMF model elements. The current version has some limitations, especially with respect to scalability. The basic problem is that you have to pass in the EObjects you’d like to find in your result. This means that you have load all these elements. For large models this is not feasible. Another issue is the missing type safety for your queries. All these things among many others should go away with the new implementation.

The code for the new query is already in the CVS and build will start to show up soon (they are already available on Hudson). Here is a screen-shot to give you an impression of how the syntax looks like.

In one of my next posts I’ll give some more insights, so stay tuned

And here you can download our slides

Martin Lippert: Slides from Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

Martin Lippert — 2009-10-28T17:05:16+00:00

Today I gave two talks at the Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 in Ludwigsburg. Here are the slides:

Enjoy!

Dave Carver: VEX (Visual Editor for XML) gets some life

David Carver — 2009-10-28T16:04:23+00:00

It has been way to long since I reported anything meaningful on VEX, a WYSIWYG editor for XML files. It originally resided on SourceForge but has since migrated to eclipse in the WTP Incubator.

Thanks to some community contributions we have a new build for early adopters to check out. This fixes a couple of bugs:

Vex "Insert Element" keyboard shortcut does not work [283293]
enhanced support for 'content' CSS property [260806]
VEX projects do not enforce a J2SE-1.5 JRE in their .classpath files [283572]
DocumentOutlinePage throws ClassCastException [257946]

Thanks to Remy Suen, Holger Voorman, Travis Haagen, and Torsten Stolpmann for their patches and contributions. Sorry it took so long to get these applied, but I'm stretched pretty thin with a variety of other eclipse related projects at the moment. In the mean time those brave souls that want to try the latest build can get it from here.

Eclipse4SL: Eclipse4SL Version 1.0.0 GA is available

admin — 2009-10-28T12:51:54+00:00

We are very happy to announce immediate availability of the feature-completed major release 1.0.0 as scheduled in the project plan. It is an eclipse-based cross-platform RIA development environment for Silverlight: two platforms are supported directly:

Windows NT/Vista/2000 32 bits
Mac OS X 10.5.x

The mains features that we have shipped are

XAML Editor & Preview with code hinting and code completion
Full compatibility with Microsoft’s Development and Design Tools
Silverlight Project System and Silverlight Compiler
Interoperability with Java Middleware webservices based on JAX & REST

The plug-in can be download in this page http://www.eclipse4sl.org/download/. Some Webdemos, tutorials and guides of best-practices can help you get started http://www.eclipse4sl.org/learn/

Migration to Eclipse Foundation is going forward positively. Eclipse Management Organization (EMO) has declared the project creation review successful. We will keep you informed on the progress.

From now, we’ll start to working on the Spring 2010 release. This release will primarily focus on improved Mac developer experience, Silverlight 3.0 design time support on Windows platform & extensibility. The upcoming version of Eclipsee4SL will also align with Eclipse Helios schedule.

Your feedback is very important for us to prioritize the features and schedule the development plan. Your contributions are welcome in the form of Bug/Feature request, User experience/Best-practice, Demo project, example sources, etc.

-Yves Yang

Eclipse4SL: Welcome to the Windows Azure SDK for Java developers

admin — 2009-10-28T10:27:44+00:00

This project started to shape up when we first prototyped the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse www.windowsazure4e.org. We wanted to build within the Eclipse IDE a Windows Azure “storage explorer” which allows developers to browse data contained in the Windows Azure storage component, including blobs, tables, and queues. The Storage Explorer was developed in Java (like any Eclipse extension), and we realized that abstracting the RESTful communication aspect between the Storage Explorer user interface and the Azure storage component made a lot of sense. So this led us to package the Windows Azure SDK for Java developers as open source project now living here www.windowsazure4j.org.

In short, the Windows Azure SDK for Java enables developers to easily leverage Azure storage service in their Java applications. The logical architecture is very simple:

From a deployment’s perspective, you can either deploy the SDK with a web application or with a desktop application

Of course, comments and feedback are welcome, so feel free to try this out and join us on the forum.

Eclipse4SL: Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers: October 2009 CTP released

admin — 2009-10-28T09:45:08+00:00

We are very excited to introduce the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, an open source plug-in that enables PHP developers using Eclipse to create web applications that target Windows Azure.

In a nutshell, the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse provides a series of wizards and utilities that allow developers to write, debug, and configure for and deploy PHP applications to Windows Azure. For example the project creation wizard looks like this:

Architecturally speaking, the plug-in leverages the PHP Development Tools (PDT) framework for enabling PHP developers with integrated developer experiences. We are planning to move fast on this project and deliver a final version 1.0 by the end of 2009.

We really hope this project will give PHP users more options when they want to leverage cloud services and of course we’re seeking feedback on feature and user experience. Feel free to speak up on the forum.

Ivar Meikas: Recent Files Plugin source code and about installation.

imeikas — 2009-10-28T09:01:26+00:00

Thanks for all the feedback I got.

I forgot to mention in yesterdays post that if anyone is interested in the source code, then it’s available from http://github.com/imeikas/RecentFiles.

About installation

For some reason the updatesite generator leaves something undone or there is another problem, but sometimes the plugin is only visible if you unselect “Group items by category” checkbox. If anyone has encountered this odd behavior and knows how to fix, please tell me.

Mik Kersten: Tasktop working with Microsoft to improve Eclipse on Windows 7

Mik Kersten — 2009-10-28T08:05:13+00:00

I spent the early years of my career with MacOS and then Linux as my primary OS. When the focus of my work moved to tool building, I decided that I needed to use the OS that was most common in the tools’ target audience. In the Eclipse ecosystem, that’s Windows, which captures more than three quarters of Eclipse IDE downloads.

The great thing about Eclipse is that architecturally, thanks to the amazing SWT framework that IBM created, Eclipse provides a native experience on your OS of choice. But last April, when I moved my primary OS to the Windows 7 RC, I noticed two things. The first was a feeling reminiscent of when I first started using Windows XP early 2001. Windows 7 was slick, responsive, and brought the desktop client to a new level of refinement. The second observation was that Eclipse and Tasktop, which I spend the majority of my time in, looked like dated Windows XP applications.

Today we’re happy to announce that Tasktop is working with Microsoft to help make Eclipse look and feel like an exemplary Windows 7 application. It is great to see Microsoft supporting this effort, since it will impact a broad range of users of the Eclipse IDE, as well users of commercial Eclipse-based IDEs such as the SpringSource Tool Suite IDE, and Eclipse RCP applications such as Tasktop Pro for Windows. Read more about the Microsoft initiative behind this on Vijay Rajagopalan’s post on the Microsoft Interoperability blog.

The majority of Eclipse’s current Windows 7 interoperability comes from the previous efforts of the Eclipse SWT teams and from the backwards compatibility of Windows 7. So you can happily run Eclipse on Windows 7 today. This allows us to focus entirely on leveraging the new features in Windows 7 and on look-and-feel enhancements. Here are a couple of highlights of the initial scope of the effort. Note that all contributions will be made to Eclipse.org under the EPL.

Taskbar Progress (Eclipse bug 293228)

Windows 7 provides a new visual representation of progress on taskbar icons. This feature removes the need to Alt+Tab to an application just to check on the status of a long-running job, such as a download. The plan is to integrate this with Eclipse progress in order to allow some key jobs, such as a full builds and runtime launches, to indicate their status on the taskbar. We already have a working prototype of this functionality, which I’ll show later today when I arrive at Eclipse Summit Europe.

Taskbar Jump Lists (Eclipse bug 293229)

The redesigned Windows 7 taskbar allows applications to expose frequently used features or files. We plan to incorporate this with Eclipse commands and actions that will benefit from quick taskbar based access.

We have some additional enhancements planned, including updating the widget colors and styling to match the Windows 7 look. SWT walks a very careful line in terms of leveraging native widgets, following accessibility guidelines and using desktop themes. Enhancing that experience would not be possible without the technical expertise of the Microsoft Windows and Eclipse SWT teams, whom we have to thank for the high quality Eclipse on Windows experience that we have today. Thanks to this new open source collaboration, what we’ll soon have is the icing on that cake.

If you’re interested in tracking progress, or chiming in with what else you would like to see implemented to streamline the Eclipse experience on Windows 7, refer to Eclipse bug 293226 and its subtasks.

Be more productive. Guaranteed.

Tonny Madsen: Running is good...

Tonny Madsen — 2009-10-28T07:09:51+00:00

...between the fine meals and many interesting talks... and the plenty beers in the evening.

I always try to attend the different runs that usually are part of all the technical conferences including Eclipse Summit Europe and EclipseCon. Not only because, you need them after long - and often interesting - talks in the evening - possibly with a few beer - but more so because the runs are very good chances of meeting people you would not necessarily talk with otherwise.

Today it was easy 5 km through some of the trails around the hotel. As Ludwigsburg is build on a small hill, it was quite interesting at times.

So a big thanks to our big leader, Chris Aniszczyk, for hosting the runs. And come and join the run tomorrow at 7:00 in the hall of the Nestor Hotel..