eclipser-blog

Time to say goodbye!

2011-11-29T21:17:00.001+01:00

I think I should start this writing from stating that this is a guest post, as I am no longer a member of IBM Eclipse Support crew.

It has been almost 5 entire years since my office was formed as a kind of joint venture between Poznan University of Technology and IBM. My main responsibility was to help customers with their Eclipse related problems. As you know, many IBM Rational products are Eclipse based, even those server-side, so I never had enough time to blog or actively participate in Eclipse development - I barely managed to open a number of bugs that could change how corporations perceived Eclipse and Eclipse-based solutions.

I'd say that my experience gathered on the border of open-source and enterprise worlds is a rather unique one. And I would like to share it with you at EclipseCon.

I guess that my 5 years of work for IBM may be summarized with the following xkcd strip - I just started realizing that careers are hard ;-).

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

If you wonder what I will do next, please stay tuned! I will announce that on my newly created blog once it gets added to the planet Eclipse (I have already opened a bug for that).

I would like to publicly say "Thank you" to Daniel Megert for his incredibly reliable work, not only in JDT - and nominate him to Eclipse Community Awards in recognition.

Thank you for reading this post :). I hope that I will have now much more time for writing.

Krzysztof (Chris) Daniel

A very interesting bug report

2011-05-30T09:02:00.000+01:00

One image is worth more than a thousand of words.
Just check this real bug report:

New preferences for Eclipse

2011-04-28T12:00:00.000+01:00

Hello All!
As you probably have noticed, Eclipse preferences are not perfect. A majority of enterprise companies struggle with enforcing consistent setttings across multiple installations, and so far nobody find a remedy which would be good enough.

Recently a light appeared in the tunnel. Ericcson contributed code for obtaining preferences from a certain URL, something similar to the Workspace Mechanic, which may solve some of the enterprise problems.

On the other hand, two GSoC proposals have been accepted in the area of preferences. I would like to get it done right this time, so any comments/suggestions are welcome.

New preferences for Eclipse

2011-02-28T10:06:00.002+01:00

This is just a small update to let you know that Eclipse preferences which I have described in my last post are hosted in Eclipse labs here together with usage description.

New preferences for Eclipse

2011-02-21T09:19:00.005+01:00

It has been long time since I recently blogged on Planet Eclipse, but as an Eclipse Support Center we have been incredibly busy during the recent year. Last time I have mentioned preferences issues that are pretty often reported and left without a fix, because of Equinox preference limitations.
We had no other choice to solve customer woes than to start a closer cooperation with Poznan University of Technology, and a group of excellent students, as a part of their thesis, analysed, designed and coded a separate preferences module, which addresses (almost) all issues in "old" preferences that we have been aware off.

Check out their webcast - it is definitely worth it (for some reason the video does not get displayed on Planet Eclipse, you have to refer to the original blog entry or directly to Youtube).

The project was started in Eclipse labs, but we would like to move it to incubator. Could any of full time commiters guide us through the process of code donation? Any help will be deeply appreciated.

The code itself requires further work, like adding proper licensing headers, project naming issues, etc. I expect the code will be ready for reviews and donations before the end of month.

Those excellent students that did that thing are:
Marek Kuzora
Anna Ferster
Filip Wisniewski (responsible for the editor)

Congratulations!

Note: Poznan University of Technology has more excellent students which would like to get experience in commercial environment (and write their thesis, too). So if you have any non-business-critical project (or research project) to realize, please drop me a line (krzysztof.daniel somewhere at pl.ibm.com), and I will contact you with appropriate person.

Eclipse preferences

2010-06-21T11:09:00.000+01:00

As you may remember from my earlier postings, on of conditions on which you can get your degree at Poznan University of Technology is taking part in so call Software Development Studio course. Participating students learn how it is like to write a software in real project, where are deadlines, quite a big team, changing requirements, real communication problems, etc. It is the first real experience of students with business world.

Google has recently created their workspace mechanic, which addresses the most common problem that big adopters of Eclipse has - preferences management in corporate environments. I am very happy that someone has finally noticed this problem.

However, I am not happy with installing 3rd party software to manage all the preferences. More, I do not believe it is a correct way. Eclipse, as a great platform, should offer such a functionality without the need of installing non-Eclipse plugins.

That's why I am supervising the project called 'Extended Preferences'. It is at very early stage, we are not sure if it will be welcome by Eclipse Foundation, but if you have some specific requirement which you think we should implement, just let us know.

For now, we would like to satisfy following requirements:

ability to define during the development, which preferences can be exported
ability to define import strategy (override, merge or reset)
ability to create a set of preferences to distribute them amongst developers
ability to promote project preferences to workspace preferences
support preferences which can be shared across workspaces
help developers to use preferences correctly (implement change listeners!)
create migration tool

We are not sure if we will succeed, the project is at very early stage, but we are going to try hard.

I will keep you informed :)

Dropins diagnosis

2010-01-26T15:54:00.000+01:00

This post is P2 related but I could not find the appropriate words to start it. Actually I would not know what to say about P2 even if I could write this in my native language. P2 was definitely a pain at some point, but I still have no clue about the real root cause - was it P2 or just the change of general approach to plugin management.

While there are certainly areas for improvement, the P2 team does a great job in fixing bugs. They are preparing API, which in my opinion will speed up P2 adoption because you all will be able to wrap existing functionality into your UI, so there will be much more testing and much more bug reports :-).

I wanted to let you know that one, in my opinion very important, bug has been fixed:
Bug 264924 - [reconciler] No diagnosis of dropin problems.

If you add right now to your .options file following lines

org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/debug=true
org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/reconciler=true

P2 will inform you what bundles were found in dropins/ folder, what request was generated, and what is the plan of installation. Maybe it is not detailed explanation of what actually happened, and what went wrong, but it should give you strong information about where to start - was your bundle in the plan? Was it installation problem (P2 fault) or maybe it is just not optimal to include your feature?

This is not a lot and a lot at the same time ;-).

Xtext - how to start

2009-12-17T14:02:00.001+01:00

Sometimes is better to have screwdriver than swiss knife. At least people from the are of DSL think that. Well, I have decided to follow this path. I need a screwdriver. In our world one of the options is to use Xtext. Xtext is a framework for development of textual domain specific languages (DSLs).

What does it mean?

You can build a grammar description and with the use of the framework get a:

EMF model related to this grammar.
Fully functional text editor.
Scaffold for the generation tool

What for?

I need to record some data in structured form. I need model. Text editor is more convincing.
But this is only my motivation. There is a sea of use cases.

How to start ?

You can download Eclispe Modeling tools distribution from Eclipse downloads site. Or use update site.
Then you can follow Xtext documentation. And this is the reason for this post. Although, you don't need to spend weeks on learning Xtext principles to build usable tools, still there are some things missing from the documentation.

You have created project, you have written your grammar. Now is a generation step. Is build successful ? Not really. If you look at the console view, you can find why.
You are generating without ANTLR. It is highly recommended to download and use the plug-in 'de.itemis.xtext.antlr' using the update site http://download.itemis.com/updates/milestones
Of course solution is to download the plug-in. After that you can follow the getting started tutorial.

Code is generated and now is time for building your XPand templates to generate Java code from your model. How to do that? There is no "generate sth.." button in your target environment.
The simplest way is to import your xxx.generator plug-in project from source to target. You are almost done. The only thing left is to add required dependencies to imported project. It is also helpful to add XPand nature to this project. After that you can follow tutorial, build XPand templates, and generate Java code.

Hope this short note will help somebody to start the adventure with the screwdriver even smoother ;)
Next time I will show you how to change editor default coloring.

Business and academic environment should go together!

2009-11-26T14:12:00.007+01:00

You may not know this, but IBM Eclipse Support Center is a child of Poznań University of Technology and IBM. Both parties believe that science is valuable only when it is closely connected to the real business world.

This is quite difficult to achieve at quite abstract level of ogranizations. "We support universities", "We are close to business world", those statements looks great in PR, which does not implicate real usefulness. The science should be inspired by business, and the business should benefit from the science.

Poznan University of Technology managed to create quite good environment, where students can gain real experience, which is so important nowadays. Rules of cooperation are quite simple:

A company proposes a project, which cannot be mission-critical.

6 students (4 developers, PM, Architect-Analytic) realize it as a bachelor thesis. This phase takes about 4-5 months.

Everybody is happy, everybody gets something valueable. Students participate in real projects, talk with real customers, while companies have their projects made for free.

We'd like to help those students, give them Eclipse know-how, which will make them really productive. Because of that reason we decided to held FREE Eclipse course for students. Check the presentation for details:

If you think that the cooperation between universities and commercial worlds is an absolute must, and you have ideas for which you do not have resources, please contact us contact us.
Even if you have ideas about Eclipse itself, if you think there is something that can be improved by those students, some new feature implemented, do not hesitate!

Eclipse Demo Camp in Poznań

2009-11-20T10:38:00.002+01:00

This year Eclipse DemoCamp will be hosted at Poznan University of Technology.

Please refer to details .

Check out our special guest!

Small but usefull enhancements to StyledText

2009-11-03T11:12:00.004+01:00

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

Helios Staging Repository

2009-11-02T09:40:00.003+01:00

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.

Eclipse e4 - getting started - dependency injection reading

2009-10-28T16:42:00.003+01:00

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.

A word or two on status handling

2009-10-19T12:09:00.012+01:00

This summer was extremly hot in Eclipse S upport Center, but right now I have a little bit more time for Eclipse code writing.

During those busy weeks I have seen a couple of times posts about logging, extended logging and other logging facilities, which are really great for headless applications, err, for OSGI applications.
But they all cannot be used to provide top-notch customer experience in business apps, because in general logs inform experienced users that something went wrong, but they will not help them in solving the issue.

UI is quite happy, because all plug-ins that have user interface based on org.eclipse.ui.workbench may use StatusHandler#handle(IStatus, int) to report an issue and inform the user in consistent manner. But it is quite difficult to add custom actions to such an error report (f.e. 'Refresh' or 'Restart') although those kind of improvements are requested again and again for various problems (OutOfMemoryException, NoMoreHandles).

Some people dream about automated Eclipse error reports, while other would like to have more control over displayed message (but they do not fill bugs ;-) ). The problem is also that non-UI plug-ins also report problems, and those problems should not be only logged, especially if a user can do something meaningful.

I have spent some time on investigating those issues, and here is my demo(excuse poor screencast quality, it simply took to much space, so I compressed it, a version with slightly better quality is here), which shows what I have in mind: small service, which allows for registering customer status handling services, so you can decorate, handle, modify or add user hints before the status and error dialog is finally presented to the user.

This is not a part of work in progress, so until there is a huge interests please do not expect this code to appear in the platform. But you can help me decide if I should push this to Eclipse.
Loading...

Best Regards,
Chris
Rational Eclipse TSE

We have official website :D

2009-09-08T12:04:00.001+01:00

Finally, after almost 3 years you can read a little bit more about us:

http://eclipse.put.poznan.pl/

CNF goes to RAP

2009-09-08T10:12:00.001+01:00

As we started new project at the university the decision was to check if RAP can be used as web presentation layer. Yup, we'll try but there are some features missing.
The biggest component we need in our system is Navigator (with pluggable content providers). But guess what ;) we have it in Eclipse == CNF. Unfortunately it doesn't work on RAP yet.
Oh, well since yesterday there is some progress ;). If you're interested there is a enhancement request opened for this issue. There you can find modified CNF plug-in and usage example. Runs on RAP 1.3.0.

Preferences Nightmare

2009-08-20T08:57:00.003+01:00

Business Eclipse adopters quite common request for headless preferences import/export. Eclipse preferences has one big disadvantage - they are exported if and only if they have been changed. So if you and your friend have some compiler settings, and you would like to import his preferences, it is impossible, because both preferences set will be merged. There is also a request to reset all existing preferences prior to import.

We, as Eclipse support, have tried to deliver solutions to those problems. But we failed because of something rather unexpected:

There is too much freedom in preferences allowed.

Developer tends to:

Cache preference node. This results in beautiful java.lang.IllegalStateException: Preference node "org.eclipse.core.XYZ" has been removed.
assume that nobody else will modify those preferences and there is no need to listen for changes.
assume that preferences can be changed only by preferences dialog and put some business logic into IPreferencePage#performOK().

And what about you? Can your preferences be exported and imported and changed via 3rd party? Or is it necessary to dig through your code innards to find what you call in performOK?

Is it so difficult to choose the right way?

Best regards,
Chris

Headless nightmare

2009-08-17T14:38:00.004+01:00

It is considered as a proper design to separate *.core from UI. Such code is flexible and very easy to maintain. And exposes important functionalities to others, so they can adopt it and create amazing tool.

But have you ever thought what will happen if your code will be used by headless client? In Eclipse support it is quite common case - someone create a scripts which creates workspace, sets up preferenfes, runs validation, builds jars and deploys them somewhere. It's only a couple of minutes to write that kind of script. Extending Eclipse requires a little bit more time, but it is possible to f.e. start server from ant script!.

Great!

But headless ant is also very quick route to headless hell. Ant application is not aware that there is no UI. Other plug-ins also seem to ignore that fact. Various dialog try to appear and break the build (there is no workbench!). There is actually ant application which creates workbench, but is it really headless script then, when user has to sit and answer when prompted?

And what about you, dear Eclipse developer?
Do your *.core components work in headless mode? Are they protected against failed extension point initialization?

I do not have even idea how to solve this issue correctly. I do not even know what should I request from bugzilla. Should each Eclipse application has own bundle set? Should Equinox allow for UI/non-UI/more general plugin division? Each architecture change will require a lot of work in many plug-ins (some plug-in cannot be easily decoupled, because f.e. *.core exposes extension point which needs to be contributed by one (and only one) extension (which is currently UI dialog)).

Now something related to my previous post:

10% of readers was able to find the route couse in less than 10 seconds (I thought it is impossible).
60% needed more than 10 seconds, but less than 1 minute.
10% of readers finished before stopwatch shown 2 minutes.
7% was able to complete the quest in 5 minutes,
7% asked for more time.

Chuck Norris also completed the survey. He was contacted by the code which asked for fix (-1 sec).

You all are in quite good shape :-).

Regards,
Chris

Look at the code and find NPE

2009-07-13T08:35:00.006+01:00

NPE at IconAndMessageDialog.getSWTImage(). No line number.
How much time do you need to figure out what's wrong?

This bugzilla entry contains spoiler (comment 6, and solution, comment 10).

The challenge code is:


private Image getSWTImage(final int imageID) {
        Shell shell = getShell();
        final Display display;
        if (shell == null || shell.isDisposed()) {
            shell = getParentShell();
        }
        if (shell == null || shell.isDisposed()) {
            display = Display.getCurrent();
        } else {
            display = shell.getDisplay();
        }

        final Image[] image = new Image[1];
        display.syncExec(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                image[0] = display.getSystemImage(imageID);
            }
        });

        return image[0];

    }

Loading...

BTW. Does anybody knows good plug-in to export html code?

Is this under EPL?

2009-07-06T17:43:00.002+01:00

Why Support don't like NOT_ECLIPSE

2009-06-25T08:28:00.003+01:00

Yes, those are usually the most difficult cases to solve. NOT_ECLIPSE.
Recently two bugs has been opened, which consumed significant amount of our time:

Bug 103301 - [Webapp] Search highlighting hangs for awhile on some pages in Internet Explorer
The title of bug clearly indicates that it is not Eclipse issue. Opera, Firefox and Chrome work fine, only IE displays information that the script is long running and whether you want to cancel it. This issue is almost impossible to reproduce without knowing search query and specifically structured help page.
This bug has been workarounded by adding timeout to the script when running on IE.

Bug 279440 - Invalid warnings when using windows offline synchronization
Maybe not all of you know, but Windows allows for accessing files from network drive even if you are offline. Those files are just kept somewhere in the cache and synchronized when possible. Now if you try to keep your project on such a network drive, can you imagine that Eclipse prompts you that your file has been modified by external tool after every save? More, if you try to reload the file, you may lost your changes. The issue is caused by the fact that Windows needs a lot of time to notice that file has been changed and to update a timestamp. So if you write anything to a file, then read its timestamp, and read it after some time, they will be different. This could not be fixed :-(.

BTW. Recently we had Galileo Demo Camp, please expect some news today.

Word wrapping in text editor

2009-06-24T09:22:00.002+01:00

This is quite long standing bug and it has 110 votes.

It is the 3rd bug most demanded by the community.

It has more than 110 comments.

If the issue is so important why there is no single patch contribution?

A Conspiracy Theory

2009-06-24T07:44:00.003+01:00

This post is my private opinion.

Bjorn Freeman Benson left his position on Eclipse Foundation.

Steve Northover has left both IBM & Eclipse. If you look closer at his new company "Bedarra Research Lab" you will notice that it is owned by dr. Brian Barry, the dr. Brian Barry who leaded OTI when it created VisualAges and Eclipse(!).
BRL states on their webpage:

We have opted for a private model so that BRL can take an aggressive entrepreneurial approach to research projects, without the time consuming approval cycles, intellectual property constraints and overhead of conventional R&D labs.

If two great people leave (more or less) Eclipse and in both cases we can see some kind of protest against "conservative" rules... it is time to discuss.

Is Eclipse agile enough to survive?

Or is it just my paranoia?

Eclipse Summer School is coming!

2009-06-17T08:08:00.003+01:00

We are proud to announce that this year we will also organize Eclipse Summer School (it is the 4th one).

Eclipse Summer School is initiative of Poznan University of Technology and IBM. We are spreading Eclipse knowledge among students (for almost free), but also commercial companies may participate.

The training is in Polish, but if you would like to review our agenda please look at google translated one.

History and photos can be found here.

This is such a big fun to see how people change their attitude to Eclipse!

Blog reading saturday, and what's up in Eclipse Support

2009-06-13T16:28:00.004+01:00

Rainy morning here. Thru Ian blog I just came accross his University Lab blog and found myself thinking how simple ideas are still so fresh in different contexts. Think corporate blogs - exist, companies blogs - exist, communities blogs - exist, political parties - some do. But University having a blog? Last week, partying with my team, we've thrown the same idea worthless. Universities, at least where I live, are fed by publications and citations counts - so why should they bother about blogs?

Kuba, from my team, wasn't there last time, but he actually works on PhD, so I just asked him why don't our Univ still have blog? Actually it turns out, things are in progress(!). So some day I might be able to learn what's on my friendly Software Engineering experts minds :-) Well having a blog might actually be helpful, because researchers are always struggling to get their way to companies, to work on real cases. However they might not see that from business people perspective, they're no easier to find too. Single blog is not a cure for all the communication problems, but looking at yourself when you don't understand how to reach others might be helpful.

Ok, so now I see my blog. How dusty here. So what cool actually happend in IBM Eclipse Support center recently?? I'll write about two things.

I'm co-mentoring one of Google Summer of Code projects, namely OSGi Monitoring. Our student Wojtek is working on getting PDE Plug-in registry view able to get some insight of self-hosted Eclipse instance, remote Eclipse instance or maybe even non-Equinox one. It's a UI version of -console. So far he went over various communication layer implementations - socket connection, ECF, R-OSGI (thanks Scott!), JMX. After he passes his exams, I hope to finally see we start, stop, install and inspect all my Eclipse instances from the machine next to me!

The other thing I wanted to write about is not that promising. Since January or Feb, we were having a customer with really bad issue. He works with several Eclipse-based IBM products but for some reason his editors are slow as hell. But what's the problem we asked; what's slow, how do you see it? He uses Eclipse text editor, JDT Java editor, and various other editors to write his scripts in a multiuser environment based on Windows network shared drives. Shared drive and text editor? You sense the catch. He must be hitting some network delays! To spice things up, issue happens only in very specific setup, different product teams suspect that the other product is failing and any kind of remote assistance is hardly possible due to security and network reasons. And finally, how to find the reason for 1-2 sec. freezes that happen only when making mouse clicks? Here Eclipse support team kicked in! The Java coredumps would help - they cleanly show what's going on in the threads. Going that path we wrote a small plug-in that drops core dumps on any hangs in Display thread. And that was the hit. It turned out a couple of plug-ins had poor selection change listeners implementations. They were making calls like java.io.File.exists() - you woudn't normally see anything wrong with that. But if the file is on shared drive a couple of calls like that easily take 1sec. - just enough to turn any excellent editor to crap! And that was it - few different components did the same fault with calling java.io APIs on selection change. Now they're working on fixing that. I hope your selection listeners don't have that bug :-)

No Ribbon in SWT

2009-05-26T12:40:00.004+01:00

For those of you who had hope to see Ribbon in SWT:

"[...] project was denied due to IP not passing (due to Microsoft
clauses)".

How to update Eclipse plug-in in P2 world?

2009-03-27T14:10:00.001+01:00

Well, before p2 it was pretty easy - one just had to drop updated plug-in into eclipse\plugins directory, and after restart (using -clean) updated plug-in was immediately there. Excelent for testing. Of course what you dropped manually, was then not possible to uninstall using Update Manager.

With p2 there's a few more steps required. If you can't make a feature update (which would be perfect solution), you need a feature patch, that will tell p2 that some plug-ins need an update. It's pretty easy with PDE Create Feature Patch wizard - only two things to take care about:
1. Make sure you know, which feature originally contributes a plug-in that you want to update.
This information can be found in Help>About Eclipse>Feature Details and by pressing "Plug-in details" at the bottom of the window.

2. Be careful with setting the host feature version.
Make sure that host feature version is general enough to work for all your clients. For example, setting version to 4.4.2.v123 won't work for users with feature 4.4.2.v125. Altough feature patch will install without single warning, plug-ins will not be updated. Setting 4.4 instead will work for both 4.4.2.v123 and 4.4.2.v123 as well as any other 4.4.x.x versions.

Does anyone know if feature patches support version ranges?

Bonus: now user can easily install/uninstall the update in p2 UI without messing with files. Yuppi!

Couple more questions: what happens if there's more than one patch for a single feature? What if after applying a patch, feature is updated to version that still matches the patch?

ps. for those who know I don't read Eclipse tips - yes this is Eclipse tip, but while I do at least 1 patch per month, figuring out everything from scratch gets boring after some time :-P

Do I want too much?

2009-03-12T21:44:00.004+01:00

Ubuntu 9.04 turned out to be a proof of concept. Some kind of joke that should not be called OS. Sorry.

Will they finish it before April? Yes.
Will Ubuntu be something that I'd like to use further? I doubt.

Saying that something is finished does not mean that it is really complete. It means that there is no more time left. So Ubuntu 9.04 will be released even if it will be considerably slower than Idle Ibex.

I know exactly what is new in particular Eclipse release, but to gain this knowledge I do need to read new and noteworthy. I do work in Eclipse support.

API is finished when there is no more time left, too. What are the consequences? A lot of compatibility layers. Tons of compatibility code. More API, because we have to maintain old code.

I believe that current division into API and internal code is not sufficient. We need the third kind - the provisional API. But it should be supported by process, not just by commens in the internal code.

Turning provisional API into the real one should not require any refactoring. Provisional API should turn into the real one when it remains unchanged for one Eclipse release and no further work on this is planned (making bug as helpwanted *counts*).

The justification is quite simple - code is adopted after the release, and then no changes can be made. I do not believe that any self-respecting architect is using Eclipse 3.5 for serious development (and replaces necessary libraries every 6 weeks).

So, Eclipse 3.4 is a base for 3.5, and 3.5 feedback will be used for 3.6... But if something is wrong in 3.5 and was not discovered yet there is no chances to remove it. Real adoption of Galileo will show its shortcomings. Some of them will live forever. For sure.

Many people contribute to Eclipse. Would you be able to withdraw the result of your employee 1 year work? Would you?

Eclipse is built from contributions. You cannot require contributors and commiters to be more loyal to Eclipse than for their employees.

But you should do everything what possible to guarantee Eclipse quality and do not allow for becoming yet another "proof of concept".

Regards,
Chris

Eclipse Debugger, part VIII

2009-03-12T09:24:00.005+01:00

While everyone is waiting for Eclipse 3.5 M6 let's have a look at one of nice features introduces to the debug area in M5 - breadcrumb for the Debug View. Breadcrumb gets activated when Debug view is too small to display its content in the normal way:

Try it out and check how it can help you in your daily debugging.

Eclipse Debugger, part VII

2009-02-24T09:53:00.003+01:00

Today I have discovered very nice feature of Eclipse Debugger - it is possible to get rid of the "Source not found" message while debugging. One obvious solution is to add the source to the code that we want to debug, but there are times when we don't have access to the sources of some libraries. In this situation we can use Step Filtering preference:

Now, when we invoke Step Into on a code which is included in this preference it will be treated as Step Over - we won't see the "Source not found" message any more.

Eclipse Debugger, part VI

2009-01-27T09:57:00.002+01:00

Recently I've told you about the Expressions view, which allows one to view the values of different expressions. There is also another view, called Display, which can do similar things, but works in a little bit different way.
The Display view is not opened by default in the Debug perspective, so to open it go to Window->Show View->Other->Debug->Display. The UI of this view is rather simple, but it can be very useful, it gives you the possibility to:

evaluate any expression and display its value
execute given expression
create a watch expression

How does it work? Just write any valid expression in the Display view (you can use Content Assist) and run actions from the view's toolbar.
The view can be used as a kind of scrapbook, where you can easily enter some elements of code and experiment a little bit while debugging.

How to embed GMF into a multipage editor?

2009-01-23T11:45:00.005+01:00

Today I have been looking through our blog archive and I have found a draf of a post about embedding GMF into a mulitpage editor. I was very surprised as the post was completed, so I wonder why I hadn't published it back then.
So here it is without any changes (better late then never):

Recently I had to find a way to embed GMF into a multipage editor. I had the experience with GMF, but I didn't know how to create a multipage editor, however, it went pretty easy and straightforward. For this short tutorial I will use the multipage editor example described here and the GMF MindMap example (you can check out the source code from the CVS). What we want to achieve it to embed the GMF editor into the first page of the exemplary multipage editor. If you follow the steps below you should get the desired result.

In org.eclipse.ui.examples.multipageeditor project find MultiPageEditorExample class and copy it to the org.eclipse.gmf.examples.mindmap.diagram.part package of org.eclipse.gmf.examples.mindmap.diagram project. There will be some error, but we will take care of them later on.
In MultiPageEditorExample you will find field private TextEditor editor; change it's type to MindmapDiagramEditor which is the class of GMF editor. Also in the method MultiPageEditorExample#createPage0 change the constructor call for the field editor.
Let's look now at the errors - they are mostly connected to MessageUtil class, which we simply don't have in our GMF project, however, we need some strings to pass them to the methods - we can put there any string we find appropriate (and later of course we can externalise those strings).
Now there should be only one error left. To get rid of it we can just comment out the method MultiPageEditorExample#sortWords and every call of this method.
For this moment we shouldn't see any errors in out diagram project. Now we have to change the editor class that is defined in the plugin.xml of org.eclipse.gmf.examples.mindmap.diagram project. Open the file, go to the Extensions tab, go to org.eclipse.ui.editors and there you should find one entry with the editor definition. Change the class attribute to point to our multipage editor (class MultiPageEditorExample).
Here it is! You should see the editor semillar to the one on the screenshot below:
I know that this is the dirty way, but if you need to do this fast, or you don't know how to start then I guess this can be a good starting point.

Eclipse Debugger, part V

2009-01-20T09:24:00.007+01:00

The third view that is extremely important for me while debugging is the Expressions view. This view allows to monitor the value of (as the name says) any expressions.

How to add expressions?
Just select the expression in the Java editor while debugging and choose Watch option from the context menu. The expression will immediately appear in the Expressions view.
You can also right click in the Expressions view and choose Add Watch Expression... option.

How to edit expressions?
If you have already some expressions added you can easily edit them by right clicking on the expression and choosing Edit Watch Expression.
What is important is that you can put any expression in this view - not only the ones that are in the code - if you want to check some hypothetical value then you can do that!

The are also some other interesting options in the context menu:

you can copy expressions to the clipboard

you can remove expressions

you can look for expressions

you can enable/disable expressions

you can reevaluate expressions

In the view's toolbar you will find options to:

show type names - shows the type names of the evaluated expressions
show logical structures - while browsing the evaluated value of the expression you can look at its logical structure. e.g. instead of looking into the internals of the Map object:

you can see the logical structure of the map:
create new watch expression (the 3rd way to do this)
remove/remove all expressions from the view

Like in the Variables view, here you can also find interesting possibilities to:

change the layout
show constants
show static variables
show qualified names
show null array entries
show references

This view can be really helpful, especially when you want to see how the values of particular expression change while debugging the code.

Eclipse Debugger, part IV

2009-01-13T10:49:00.004+01:00

As I said in the previous part this time I will focus on the Variables view, which helps us preview the values of variables during the process of debugging.

The view itself is rather straightfoward, however, I'm not sure if everyone knows about the options available in the view's menu like:

changing the layout of the view - e.g. the view can be turned into the horizontal orientation or you can change the displayed columns
for java debugging you can turn on/of showing:
- constants
- static variables
- qualified names
- null array entries
- referneces (I have already written about this: point 3) in this post)

I thing it is good to go through all this options and see how they work as some of them can be extremely useful while debugging.

One more thing worth mentioning is the possinility to change the details formatter. Look here if you want more details.

Looking for your comments!

P.S. Look to the comments for information about Logical Structures available in the Variables view. Thanks Curtis for this!

OSGi Services in PDE Registry!

2009-01-07T13:27:00.003+01:00

Starting with today's Eclipse build you can finally control OSGi services running inside Eclipse. Simply go to your favourite Plug-in registry view and Group view contents by Services.

Having done that, you should see all running services in one place, ordered by their names, with their properties and list of bundles using each service instance.

Using view filter it's now pretty easy to search for particular service or explore interfaces provided by different bundles.

The next step is to see the details of launched self-hosted Eclipse or OSGi instance.

Eclipse Debugger, part III

2009-01-05T09:45:00.004+01:00

Let's continue our tour through the features of the Eclipse debugger. In the last parts (Part I, Part II) I was writing mostly about breakpoints and this time won't be any different. When we look at the views provided by the debugger we will find

the Breakpoints view.

The main purpose of this view is to manage the breakpoints - it allows to easily (going from left to right through the buttons on the view's toolbar):

remove selected breakpoints - I guess it's self explaining
remove all breakpoints - I guess it's self explaining
show breakpoints supported by selected target - when you debug different kind of artifacts (code in java or C or ant build script) you can make the Breakpoints view show only the breakpoints that are supported by this type of the given artifact [Thanks Jacek for helping with figuring this out!]
go to the file for breakpoint - it will show the place where the breakpoint is set in the editor
skip all breakpoints - when you don't want any breakpoint to be active check this option
add java exception breakpoint - I was writing about this in the first part

More cool features can be found in the view's menu, you can:

group the breakpoint by many criteria, e.g. type, project, files, etc.
define breakpoints working set
check the option to show qualified names in the view

The view allows you also to change the breakpoints' properties directly from the context menu - just right click on any breakpoint and you would see the options to:

change the hit count value
make the breakpoint suspend the VM or suspend the thread

To finish the breakpoints story it has to be said that breakpoint can be imported and exported - you can open the appropriate wizards from the Breakpoints menu or from the File->Export->Run/Debug->Breakpoints option.

Is there anything I have missed about breakpoints? Please, share!

That's it for this week - next time I will focus on the Variables view, which is essential for efficient debugging.

Eclipse Debugger, part II

2008-12-22T11:46:00.008+01:00

As I said in the Part I, this time I will focus on the Hit Count property and the Conditions of breakpoints. If you go to the breakpoint's properties (right click on the breakpoint and choose Breakpoint properties... option) you will see two interesting options:

Hit count

When we enable the Hit Count and give some positive integer value X the breakpoint will suspend the execution when it would be hit Xth time.
Lets illustrate this with example. If we consider the following code:

and we set the Hit count of the breakpoint (look at the picture above to see where the breakpoint is placed) to 7 we will find the following output in the Console view before the execution is suspended:

So as you can see the execution was suspended when the breakpoint was hit 7th time.

Conditions
Sometime everyone faces the situation when we want a breakpoint to be active only if some condition is fulfilled (e.g. we go in the loop through a 1000 elements list o people's names and we want to debug this loop for a particular name and we don't want to go 1000 times through this loop). To see how it works let's take the same code and let's set the condition the following way:
In this case the output in the Console view will look as follows:
The given condition is evaluated in the context of the breakpoint, so we can use all the variables that are available the context. Of course you don't have to use the numerical conditions, any expression that gives boolean answer can be used!

Eclipse Debugger, part I

2008-12-11T10:33:00.019+01:00

Last semester I had some classes with students during which they had to prepare some easy projects. One of my requirements was that the project had to be implemented in Java, hence every team used Eclipse as an IDE. In my discussion with students it came out that a lot of them prefer debugger from Visual Studio over debugger from Eclipse. I was pretty surprised as I had a chance to use the VS debugger a lot in one of my projects and it didn't make good impression. When I got into details during the discussions it looked like the students had no idea about many features of Eclipse debugger and after some time some of them agreed that it is better then VS debugger.
This situation made me think that there is a need for some kind of tour through Eclipse debugger's features to share our knowledge about this great tool. Every week I will try to write a little bit about one of the debuger's aspect. If you have any hints or hacks for the debugger let me know - we can learn from each other!

Types of breakpoints
I would like to start with different kinds of breakpoints that are available in the debugger. We can use:
- line breakpoint
- method breakpoint
- field breakpoint
- class breakpoint
- java exception breakpoint
I guess that most of us use usually the first type and we tend to forget about others, however, that often can come very handy.

Line breakpoints
The post popular ones, so I won't get into the details. They make the execution pause whenever the given (marked as breakpoint) line is hit. Breakpoints like this can be created by clicking the ruler on the line we want to put the breakpoint on.
Method breakpoints
This kind of breakpoints pauses the execution whenever the processing enters or/and exists the given method. Breakpoints like this can be created by clicking the ruler on the line where the name of the method in the declaration of the method is written.
When we look to the breakpoint properties (right click on the breakpoint and choose Breakpoint Properties...) we will find the option to activate the breakpoint on method entry or/and exit:
Field breakpoints
Field breakpoints pause the execution whenever the given field is read or/and modified.
In the breakpoint properties we can set when the breakpoint is active:
Class breakpoints
These breakpoints pause the processing when the given class (or interface) is loaded by the JVm for the first time.

Java exception breakpoints
Allow to pause the execution of the application when particular exception is thrown. They can be set in the Breakpoints view. Choose Add Java Exception Breakpoint option:
and give the name of the exception you want to monitor:
In the end in the breakpoint properties you can set if you want this breakpoint to be active on caught or/end uncaught exceptions or maybe on subclasses of the given exception:

Did I miss any kind of breakpoints?

Next time I will try to write about the Hit count option and the breakpoints' conditions.

OSGi example = Spring Dynamic Modules + Equinox Declarative Services

2008-12-08T12:18:00.013+01:00

Well, it took me a while to came up with that example.
As I am working on design of some fancy spring osgi equipped application some research was needed to check how and if it works as described ;).
But why not to make this more interesting and add some integration to this deliberations.

Summary

In this post I am going to show how to integrate Spring DM and OSGi DS (Equinox implementation). The only purpose for the code is to show that it is possible. It is only OSGi powered version of helloWorld software :D

What can be useful ?

Main idea

As it was late in the night usability of the example is not catchy :D "hello" here "hello there" but the main idea is to show that it works :D.
Ok so we have 3 bundles. Two of them are using declarative services and the last one is using spring to provide it services :D

Programmer notes

First thing to mention. To build spring bean I am using maven. As you all know there is something called maven project structure. The best place to store META-INF is resources directory in src catalog. Don't do it this way. To make bundle visible for PDE tooling we need to store META-INF in the root of the project. Of course this requires changes in pom.xml project description.

As we have it visible as a bundle let me add some content.
First our service:
package nugae.spring.example; public interface IHelloService { void sayHello(); }
It has its implementation in nugae.spring.example.impl package.
Next we need to define our service definition. It is recommended to split osgi and beans definition.

I assume that you may know standard bean definition so I will only focus on the osgi definition (component-osgi.xml):

Basically, saying that we deliver some service can be done with this declaration:
<osgi:service id="springService" ref="helloService" interface="nugae.spring.example.IHelloService" />
At the moment (in theory) we have our service (and bundle) ready to deployment.

Lets move then to our declarative services. As I've mention we'll add consumer and another provider bundles.
It is worth to mention that in eclipse 3.5M3 we have DS tooling available in PDE.

Declaring service using DS is nothing more complicated than using spring approach.
Neither specifying services required.

So what we have here ?
We just specified that our bundle requires two services (one delivered by other DS bundle and second provided by Spring bundle.

So let bring it to life :D

To bring the DS functionality to our target platform we need some bundles (can be checked out from :pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/rt):

The simplest way to run spring osgi support is to use target provided by spring framework.

It contains all required bundles.

Conclusions

It works. Well I am surprised cause sometimes not everything work as described ;).
I think that OSGi brought new quality to developing java application. The level of freedom we've using different approaches make it even more attractive.
If you want to run this example (hopefully you will be able following this post)
source codes can be downloaded from here.

SWT Ribbon again

2008-11-28T19:17:00.003+01:00

Chris Aniszczyk posted short info about SWT Ribbon created by Emil Crunhorn.

I was just a little bored today - America has Thanksgiving so we had not had a lot of work in support - and I have tried to run SWT Ribbon under my Ubuntu 8.10. I have to admit I was 100% sure it will not work.

Check the result:

DemoCamp in Poznan

2008-11-28T12:57:00.004+01:00

So this week we had the DemoCamp in Poznan. It was the 3rd time and I'm really impressed by how it has changed over time.

First DemoCamp was at the University, lecture style. Lots of attendees, most of them students, tough topics like g-Eclipse and Equinox. Feedback for us was that yes people in Poznan are interested in Eclipse.

Second DemoCamp, together with Ganymede release in June. This time as an informal evening event with beer and pizza. Lightning talks really astonished me! Suddenly it had turned out that there's more RCP developers around than we know. We received some interesting questions too.

And now this week's evening event. We planned for 3 demos and lightning talks session, but I noticed that after second demo, we could have stopped already. People started talking, gathering into groups and discussing their own topics. Amazing!
Topics, I heard of, ranged from "where does Eclipse name come from (FrED)?", thru modeling (promoted tirelessly by Grzegorz), to use of AOP for tiers separation.

This time was special also because of the guests we had: The Embarcadero's big guy, trying to fit delicious polish beer and the new era of SQL development on a very narrow table; an incognito Platform committer from Krakow teaming up with his GSoC student, and our new Platform.UI committer Chris. There were also some unexpected guests like famous traveller Mr. Wallet from Berlin, and some Scottish couple :-) Thank you all for visiting us!

See more pictures..

DemoCamp Poznan

2008-11-24T23:07:00.003+01:00

I wish to thanks organizers, speakers (excluding me), and attenders for great atmosphere. I don't want to go here with summary of that event (probably Jacek will do it, and for sure better than me). I want to put here only small reminder.

During lightening talk I pointed out the idea of hackathon. During summit there was toast application presented and as it is a example of capabilities of Equinox ready to hack, why not ? So if you want give it a try please contact the authors (details on the wiki).

Another Eclipse commiter among Eclipse enthusiasts from Poznań!

2008-11-24T11:10:00.003+01:00

Last week Christopher Daniel from our team was officially announced a full commiter on the UI component of the eclipse.platform project!
Congratulations Chris! Make the Platform even better then it is now! :)

The Worldwide Kindness Day

2008-11-21T08:40:00.003+01:00

My Rational Application Developer was very very kind today to me while I was doing some kind of tracing:

Time to load bundles: 14
Starting application: 1594
Application Started: 18245
I LOVE YOU
Valid-responses ok error M E Removed New-entry MT Created Remove-entry Clear-sticky Checked-in Merged Clear-static-directory Update-existing Copy-file Set-sticky Valid-requests Mod-time Notified Set-static-directory Template Updated Module-expansion
valid-requests

That's an example!

Eclipse Tip - Ctrl+1 and 'if's

2008-11-20T12:26:00.004+01:00

Quick assist can do a lot of work for you. This flash shows what kind of manipulation you can perform on 'if's. Please use next/previous button to navigate between slides.

If you need more info, please go to Eclipse Help.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 daily report

2008-11-19T19:01:00.004+01:00

but before I'll start let me show you my way to Eclipse Summit this year ;)

As I am student (really ;) ) I've got the student discount. Following the rule of savings I have flight to the Germany ;) . It was investment in time and money, train is twice as much time and $ painful. Anyway it was very lively travel. I took one car, one plain, one RE, one S-bahn to get to Ludwigsburg. I booked the chipest accommodation possible but it has at least three drawbacks:

It is far to far form the city center.
There is only one bus every half hour.
breakfast are served till 9am.

But as I pay for everything from my pocket, money counts (lets say I don't like to spend on myself ;) )

Maybe later one I'll report on how Ludwigsburg looks like for me (first time I made whole trip by foot) but now let me say few words about conference itself.

There were 4 sessions today. the choices were sometimes hard. one not wisely made.
Talking only in superlatives I've heard several good speeches, I have some interesting conversation between them and I've seen how huge power is Eclipse community. As I have barely no time today (well it is rather matter of not having internet at my room, even hostel) I'll sum-up what I heard today tomorrow.
Of course I'm not the only person with camera at this event (Ed will probably present bunch of nice photos) but let me show you one (that how it started).

P2 Tip: how to customize default list of update sites?

2008-11-19T12:12:00.003+01:00

If you'd like to ship your product together with P2, but containing custom set of update sites in "Help -> Install New Software", then:
1. Go to "Help -> Install New Software -> Manage Sites"
2. Shape the list using Add/Remove/Modify, and press "OK" when you're done
3. Copy org.eclipse.equinox.p2.artifact.repository.prefs and org.eclipse.equinox.p2.metadata.repository.prefs from eclipse/configuration/.settings/
to your final build configuration directory

By default Eclipse comes with two sites configured this way - linking to ganymede release train and updates.

Eclipse DemoCamp Poznań!

2008-11-18T10:48:00.002+01:00

Hello,

We'd like to invite you to Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan - a part of word-wide series of events organized by Eclipse community. We're meeting on Monday evening, November 24th, in Piwnica 21 pub. Starting at 18:00.

We'll be promoting Eclipse as an IDE and RCP platform, this time with our special guest - Wassim Melhem - committer on Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment project, who is currently working on commercial database tooling based on Eclipse. Dawid Weiss from Poznan University of Technology will tell a few words about combining Carrot search engine, and finally Bartosz Michalik will show his work on PDE Product Customization - a heaven (and hell at once) for all RCP integrators.

As always, this time again, you'll have chance to sell yourself, your product, share experiences or even rant a little bit during lightning talks. Last time they were really popular, so prepare good, as you may have to fight for your 5 minutes on stage :D

To better support discussions, we'll have some free beer, pizza and DanceDanceRevolution for most excited Eclipse fans ;-)

All details are at http://wiki.eclipse.org/DemoCamp/Poznan. Please register there (directly on wiki, or by sending email to one of organizers).

DemoCamp's shape

2008-11-16T00:00:00.001+01:00

Going to demo camp with presentation is always difficult, especially if you need to travel from Poznan to Krakow (both cities are in Poland). The main problem is that Krakow is in dead zone. It does not matter which transport medium (a car, a train or even a plane) you select, it always takes 6 hours or more to get from one city to another.
You can easily imagine my big astonishment when I saw people that travelled even longer to give their lightning talk and listen to other presenters (including me with RAP). I invited them also to Poznan, which is much closer then Krakow, but they gently refused - they wanted democamp to be similar to conference rather than informal talk, where people share with their Eclipse experience.
I am a little bit said, because we have resigned from fixed schedule in Poznan to be flexible and to encourage our guests to start talking. Eventually our program has been received as rather "poor", and the democamp is considered as an event in its starting phase. This is basically not true, as Jacek (in cooperation with others) is putting a lot of work to get everything working correctly and everybody to be happy.
So, I'd ask a general question: What are you expecting from demo camp you are going to attend?

Regards,
Chris

I have seen this before

2008-11-15T23:27:00.002+01:00

Martin Fowler's latest post shows quite interesting use of Open Source. In one sentence: let the customer to develop your Open Source solution and charge him for that.
This is quite similar to Eclipse approach (maybe except charging), isn't it?

Experiences with Eclipse development

2008-10-20T13:12:00.002+01:00

I've heard there are some polish people developing applications using all cool stuff from Eclipse.org (like RCP/Equinox/...).

If so, please let me know.

Thanks to student discount

2008-09-15T22:53:00.001+01:00

Poland loaded with DemoCamps

2008-09-11T09:03:00.004+01:00

I figured out, I'll post now, while it's true - 30% of November DemoCamps seem to be in Poland!

I'm counting with the hidden one, organized by our local amazing modeling expert, who's affraid he won't find enough speakers.
Altough committers don't grow here in every corner (like mushrooms), there must be a lot of love to Eclipse!

Product Customization - GSOC release

2008-08-26T11:09:00.004+01:00

This is the time for small summary. I hope Product Customization is about to became part of Eclipse. There is some work to do and there is some work already done. Big thanks to my GSOC08 mentors Kim and Chris for their support.
There are :

Remove features from tree (Views, Commands etc.. - in general all IPluginElements / IPluginExtensions if you are familiar with the PDE Product model)
Changing name of nodes.
Launching product with transformations
Exporting product with transformations

available. If you want to see it in action or read in detail please go to my GSOC blog.

2008-08-07T14:38:00.004+01:00

If you ever had to extend an inherited or undocumented Eclipse based application, weren't you wondering what might be hiding in it? Myriads of misterious extension points and handy services. Since Eclipse 3.4 it's easy to deep dive into Eclipse extension points and services thanks to PDE Plug-in Registry view.

But as most of Eclipse based applications use Eclipse 3.3 or even 3.2, now it's getting easier to use Plug-in Registry in those older releases too, thanks to this bug.
Following screenshot presents 3.4 Plug-in Registry view installed in IBM Rational Software Modeler, based on Eclipse 3.3. Revealed are all GMF editors tool palettes with their IDs and names, which makes it easy to add even more tools!

EditingSupport + TreeViewer

2008-08-05T08:58:00.003+01:00

On of the product customizations I work on is changing name of the object at tree. The first idea sounded quit reasonable for me so I've started implementing it as in place editor for tree items. one thing I found interesting was:

"Since 3.3, an alternative API is available, see ViewerColumn.setEditingSupport(EditingSupport) for a more flexible way of editing values in a column viewer."

so I've decided to get it a chance.

DISCLAIMER: I won't take any responsibility of you implementing editing in viewer this way. In fact I hope some of you will show me the right way.

So I have a tree viewer with "default" column which is a tree.
Each column editor (including TreeViewer has editElement method which can be used for editing n'th column for a given element). But it doesn't work cause you need a cell editor for given column. How this is provided ? Via EdditingSupport.
EditingSupport need to be associated with given column, so we need a column. Ok but column apart of having editing support need to have label provider set up. The label provider it needs is an CellLabelProvider. Oh dear can we then reuse our ILabelProvider, IFontProvider etc.. we had by the moment ? Yes, and no. There is one wrapper label provider WrappedViewerLabelProvider but unfortunately with the package access. So to reuse it in 3.4 you must copy the code.
That's all ?? Almost. If you are ok with the default firing the editor (on left mouse click, for programmatic actions or tab moving) it's all (well you need also some code for keep you column of proper size, but that's detail). I need to have editor fired only on my programmed events. To say how the editor should be fired provide EditorActionStrategy for the view.
So how it look like:


TreeViewerEditor.create(fTreeViewer, new NameEditorActivationStrategy(fTreeViewer), ColumnViewerEditor.DEFAULT);
  fLabelProvider = new ExtensionCustomizationLabelProvider(getCustomizationInfo(), toolkit);
  column.setLabelProvider(new CustomizationViewerLabelProvider(fLabelProvider));
  column.setEditingSupport(new NameEditingSupport(fTreeViewer));

where NameEditorStrategy, ExtensionCustomizationLabelProvider, NameEditingSupport are my custom implementations of objects I've mentioned before.

And as I have said before: I really hope there is an easier way.

Another reason to love Mylyn!

2008-07-28T09:43:00.002+01:00

Mylyn is one of my favorites Eclipse project, I especially like the context feature, but as every software Mylyn also has some bugs, fortunately there is also great Mylyn team. Last Thursday while working on Bug 241505 I wanted to add this bug to the Task List view. I went to the Task Repositories view, right click on the Eclipse.org repository, chose Open Repository Task option...and I came across a bug. I went to Bugzilla, submitted a bug, checked out Mylyn code from the CVS and started looking at the code to find and kill this bug (Plyg-in Spy helped me of course to find the code, where the bug could be). In order to start debugging I ran another instance of Eclipse with fresh Mylyn plug-ins and...you can imagine how surprise I was when I couldn't reproduce the issue?! I looked at the CVS history and it appeared that bug reported by me, had already been submitted and it had been already fixed! So now I have another reason to love Mylyn - the Mylyn team fixes bugs faster then I am able to find them! Kudos to the Mylyn team and all its contributors!

Are you Eclipse certified developer?

2008-07-18T10:56:00.005+01:00

Are you a developer that uses Eclipse and writes plugins, but you do not contribute often enough to get commiter status?

Do you think it should be possible to get some certificate that would say that you are f.e. JDT expert? That you are really acquainted with that JDT and you know how to use it?

Do you think that there is a gap in Eclipse process, because it certificates commiters (yes, commiter status is a kind of certificate) and does not certificate you, although you know everything about using certain Eclipse project?

Would you like to see such a certificate in your CV?

It is a time to look into that bug.

GSOC 2008 milestone

2008-07-13T23:16:00.003+01:00

Yup it is half of this year GSOC edition. At the moment everything goes well.
If you are interested how the Product customization looks like at the moment you can find some movie at my blog. Thank you Kim, Chris for your advices and support.

Thank you Picasso

2008-07-09T11:17:00.008+01:00

Someone saw following dialog:

Something really went wrong. Why is that? Let's visualise:

Easy. Support area increments the number of column, so you have two rows 3 columns each and all components are placed there somehow... But... Wait, why there is that empty blue box?

It looks like components responsible for message are not placed on the correct composite...

Let's fix this.

Voila!

Now everything works perfectly :) Thank you Picasso!

Eclipse Summer School 2008

2008-07-03T16:36:00.004+01:00

I am pleased to announce, that in cooperation with Poznan Univeristy of Technology, we are preparing next edition of Eclipse Summer School. We are going to teach students (and not only, companies are also welcomed) how to use Eclipse and how to create RCP applications.

The tutorial is 5 days long and we guarantee dinners, coffee, tea, sweets and a lot of fun!

You can find more details here: www.eclipsesummerschool.com. Unforunately the site has no English version, so please use google translate.

We are also looking for sponsors, so if you would like to look for new hires or to promote your company in academic environemnt, please let me know.

Regards,
Chris

PS. Last year 95% of particapants told us that they would recommend our training!

Fighting with "No more handles"

2008-06-20T13:57:00.005+01:00

I have not found more irritating thing ever - actually there is the only thing (for me) that causes RCP to stop working.

Unfortunately handle limits are not written down anywhere - because they differ a lot depending on component and operating system. It is very often caused by 10 000 handles limit per process in Windows XP.

How to increase the number of available handles?

Someone clever told: "if you ask, you are wrong".

And this is completely right - do you really need 10000 thousand of controls on your form? Do you really need to be able to serve tens of views and editors at once?

You do not have so many controls? Install sleak and look for handle leaks.

If you went through two previous points, and you are completely sure, that you need every single control you are using, your interface is well designed and you do not have memory leaks... than please open your task manager, go to the processes view, select view -> select columns and check User Objects. You should see something like that:

Now please verify that there is a strong correlation between USER counts and the number of opened editors/views etc, and be sure that No More Handles occurs when User Handles approaches 10 000.

If you have confirmed, that you have really met a Windows limitation, please rethink once more your design.

And then go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327699 and follow their instructions. And be aware of their "limited" responsibility for that hotfix ;-).

Regards,
Chris

GSOC 2008 Product Customization

2008-06-07T16:52:00.002+01:00

For all of you who are interested in progress in my GSOC project: here is a category form my Frankfurt blog which I use to post the progress. Fortunately progress in the project is better than in blogging at this page :D

Hot Eclipse Summer coming

2008-05-25T13:31:00.006+01:00

Next couple of weeks are going to be pretty challenge for all not-yet-Eclipse-converted Java developers in Poland. With the last day of May, we'll see them on Javarsovia. - 2nd edition of Polish Java Conference in Warsaw, probably the largest Java conference in our country.

The same day we're also in Poznan, on a must-see Poznan Open Source Event located at Poznan University of Technology.
Btw. conference name is pretty funny because it's originally abbreviated as PIWO, in english BEER. Now you understand, why I say "must-see" :)
Hopefully they don't give us as long straws as it was recently on Juwenalia:

hope, then everybody'll be ready for DemoCamps invasion!

Poznan's Eclipse GSoC students at IBM Eclipse Support Center

2008-05-07T16:48:00.009+01:00

We were guesting our Google Summer of Code students recently. We got to know each other and had a chat with : Ola Woźniak who is working on project “Compare with” dialog, Marek Zawirski (on the right) with Push operation implementation and GUI improvements for egit Eclipse plugin and Mateusz Matela (on the left) who was accepted to contribute toString() generator.

They are welcome to use our Eclipse Center as a place where they can find support, advice from our engineers and good coffee :-).

Onec again congratulations and good luck with your projects!

GSOC 2008 announced

2008-04-21T20:50:00.003+01:00

After some delay there it is. Congratulation to all students. There is one thing to highlight. This year we have two students located in Poznan. Best wishes Ola and Mateusz :)
UPDATE: look at here there is another one :D good luck Marek.

How good are your tests?

2008-04-14T21:10:00.002+01:00

Does this test have any sense?


public void testMe() {
  String result = concat("Fr", "ank");
  assertNotNull(result);
}

Probably yes, but there's not much use of it, as most of concat(String,String) implementations will pass, e.g. this:


public String concat(String a, String b) {
  return "Not implemented :-)";
}

So, recently I'm working on some smarter testing approach, which you maybe heard of, called mutation testing. It's idea is to rerun tests, modifying the system a little bit every time, to catch those test cases, that don't really care what system returns, or which always pass whatever happens.

Mutation testing is nothing really new, ah actually I think I have seen some articles about it dated back to 1990s..
What nobody liked about it since that old times, is that they're SLOW. Just imagine you have a system of more than 10 classes and you want to make some small changes in it, recompile and rerun whole test suite every time for 100 or 1000 times - you get the idea.

And here I'm getting to the point, why it's worth posting about this on Eclipse blog. After some tiny prototyping with pure junit library, I have switched to jdt.junit and now have ahead of me a pretty nicely working framework. It's really amazing how jdt.junit code is flexible.

Hopefully soon (no later than June - when I'm going to defend my master thesis), my users will get a nasty pinch for every test the tool finds useless :)

An Automatic generation of EMF Editor Idea

2008-04-10T09:20:00.004+01:00

I am quite busy right now, however I have an idea which does not allow me to focus on my task.

Could you please imagine, that you have generated your model and .edit code, and now you want to have nice editor...

EMF generates one, but I'd say its rather a good start point than real editor.

But please imagine that you can are able to metamark your model like on example:


@RootObject(cardinality="1", displayType="Shell Title", displayValue="getName")
//alternative
//@RootObject(cardinality="*", displayType="list", canCreateNew="true", displayValue="getName")
public interface RootModelClass (){
 
   @Edit(Editable="false")
   public String getName();
   
   @Edit(canCreateNew=true, asSubsection="true", value="getName")
   public ChildModelClass getChildren();
}

@TabbedEdit(tabs="first, second")
public interface ChildModelClass (){
   @Edit (Editor="Text" flags = "SWT.SINGLE" validator="ExemplaryValidator")
   @Tab(name="first")
   public getName();

   @Edit(canCreateNew="true", Editor="RecursiveTree")
   @Tab(name="second")
   public ChildModelClass getChildren();

}

Generated editor for this example should put the name of the root object as a title of an application/itself, display a list of the children, and then, depending on the child selection, display a recursive tree with child children. On selection of the 2nd level child a new section could be displayed that would allow for edition.

I know this is a rough, incomplete and inconsistent idea, but I'd love to hear any feedback on this.

Regards,
Chris

Don't underestimate CDT

2008-04-09T13:59:00.002+01:00

If you ask me whether I am C++ or Java programmer I will say Java's one. I used to program C++ a lot and now I am in the situation I will probably do even more.
Recently, I've got a code to analyze. So as I am doing most of my programming in Eclipse choice was as usual. The software is pretty big and I tend to be lazy when I can so I decided to import my code to the managed project.
Unfortunately, the code conventions are a bit different from common practices (or maybe something has changed since I've switched to Java). Some parts of code are kept in *.cxx files and #included in *.hpp files. Unfortunately with default configuration the code in *.cxx is compiled what evidently leads to compilation errors. What I wanted to do (fortunately that rule is followed in whole project) was excluding *.cxx files from compilation.
I started with trying File Types project preferences option, but without results.
Then I found working solution. After setting everything up switch off automatic makefiles. Several minutes ago I was thinking that this is the only solution. But don't ever underestimate tools you don't know well.
Obviously there is a simple and elegant solution. Project preferences ->C/C++ General -> Paths and symbols -> Source locations tab. You can even make index
working on excluded files.
That made my day :)

Polish Eclipse Community

2008-04-02T19:58:00.003+01:00

As Chris's asked about regional communities I sprint to remind you that we've build one in Poland. And it is each day growing. So if you are not involved yet please visit Eclipse forum. And if you wat to see whole picture of Eclipse community, Polish edition you can do it at this eclipse wiki page.

Eclipse in SDJ articles series

2008-04-02T19:18:00.003+01:00

Maybe it is not time for saying that but this is surly worth to be announced.
Last year we (authors of this blog and Mirek Ochodek) started project which was intended to introduce Eclipse to the Polish community.
We came with the idea to write several articles about platform both from the programmer and end user point of view. We started cooperation with "Software" publisher and planned special Software Developer Journal about Eclipse platform. After almost two month of hard work (and at this point I must say I am really grateful for the time and passion all my friends put into this project) we've got all response from the articles' reviewers. All of them was great and I am personally proud of the quality we've achieved. At that point I was hoping that the magazine would be soon available for the community, but by now it is not. Unfortunately due to the problems with sponsorship of such a special issue, recently the project has changed the form. Although this is not the result we all have expected, it seems the articles will be published in monthly editions of the magazine, one by one. The topic we have covered are following:

Eclipse community

Eclipse IDE

Debugging and unit testing in Eclipse

Mylyn - task oriented development

TPTP

Eclipse for web development

Beyond Eclipse

SWT/JFace

Building RCP applications

GEF and GMF

I will inform you about first article from the series.

workspace setup

2008-04-01T11:53:00.002+01:00

Are you maybe from big corporation with strict development environment rules?

I remember once comming to such a company, I was given a misterious User Guide doc, about 20 pages long paper telling how to prepare a workspace, what are my coding conventions from now, why should I set up auto-save option, etc. etc. etc. It finally turned to be a day long wend thru Window -> Preferences thicket.

Hmm so how about doing it automatically?

Eclipse is hard to use?

2008-03-31T14:27:00.003+01:00

Beside working for IBM Eclipse Suppot Center I'm a PhD student and teacher of Software Engineering course at Poznan University of Technology. During the classes I often ask students to do some tasks in Eclipse (e.g. write some jUnit tests, refactor some code, etc.), however, some of them complain that Eclipse is hard and not intuitive to use. Most of them claim that Visual Studio is more user friendly and that it allows to develop code more effectively. They say that there are too many windows, options, shortcuts, etc. and that it is hard for them to start from stratch.
I started wondering if we could do something to show new users that Eclipse is easy to use and that it has a lot of useful features. Are there any tutorials which shows how to use Eclipse as an IDE? Or maybe there is a need to create tutorials like this? Maybe there should be new UI elements added, which would allow faster start (e.g. Simply Java Project which would require to give the project name only)? Any other ideas what we could do to allow easier start for new Eclipse users (or at least for the lazy ones)?

Bioclipse

2008-03-07T10:39:00.003+01:00

For sure Eclipse is used in many context and environments. But I was quite surprised when I found it here. Although this is out of scope my current research interests maybe it will interest some of you.

The sly fox' clause

2008-02-15T13:08:00.005+01:00

I am working on new status dialog for some time. And my work progress very slowly, so even if this code will be released for M6 it is impossible to make API stable. I do believe that 4 weeks is not enough to do that. This issue seems to have serious impact on my work - it is too late to release the code, because then it will go to API and should be maintained forever. I do not find myself good enough designer to take that risk...
So... should I postpone my work?
Actually I would have a lot of problems if Szymon Brandys and John Arthorne hadn't shared with me their knowledge (yes, they allowed me to write about this if I put their names in the note).
So, the trick is to put following comment into javadoc:


<p>
IMPORTANT: This class is <em>not</em> intended to be subclassed.
</p>

This little clause is warranty of binary compatibility in case of any changes. Well... actually it indicates there is no warranties at all, and if you try to derive from that API anything its your problem.

Of course I could use final clause. But then nobody would be able to use my classes and provide feedback...

The trick is called "soft API".

By the way, if you have a second or two please look at new status dialog.

Regards,
Chris

CoreException anit-pattern

2008-02-08T13:55:00.000+01:00

Hello there

I have run recently into bug 212340. There is described anti-pattern that causes stack trace to vanish.

The explanation is quite easy - currently StatusManager#handle accepts IStatus, and CoreException has getStatus method... So it is almost reflex action to write:
StatusManager.getManager().handle(e.getStatus()); CoreException's stack trace is lost...

So... wrap CoreException in IStatus before passing it to StatusManager!

Regards,
Chris

Automatic generation of BIRT reports

2008-02-07T09:01:00.000+01:00

Automatic generation of BIRT reports is a common task for every company that has reports that should be presented to the customers.

Those reports should be delivered regularly. If howto that I am going to present is available somewhere than I am sorry, but I was not able to find it out and I had to merge knowledgle scattered in a several wiki pages.

But in the ends solution seems to be very easy:

1. Download BIRT runtime and unzip it somewhere. You should have now birt-runtime-2_2_1_1 folder.
2. Set up environment variable to point to that folder either in OS or inside birt-runtime-2_2_1_1\ReportEngine\genReport.bat(sh for linux).
3. Put your jdbc jar file in folder birt-runtime-2_2_1_1\ReportEngine\plugins\org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.2.1.r22x_v20070919\drivers.
4. Execute genReport.bat script to see usage. For all those good computer scientists (and good computer scientist is a lazy one) I present sample command:
genReport.bat -f PDF -o outputfile.pdf -F report_design.rptdesign

I hope it will help somebody.
Regards
Chris

Exporting RCP application in Eclipse 3.4M4 with Java 1.6 on board

2008-02-06T11:19:00.000+01:00

Recently I have been trying to export small RCP application from Eclipse 3.4M4. Unfortunately I encountered problems with exporting plug-ins which were using Java 1.6 specific features. I have even reported new bug, however Remi Chi Jian Suen was on his place and suggested me to add:
jre.compilation.profile = JavaSE-1.6
entry to the build.properties file of my plug-ins. It worked perfectly - thanks Remi! The only doubt I have is: shouldn't it be added automatically when user uses Java 1.6 no to let him go to similar troubles?

4'th February - World Cancer Day

2008-02-05T00:52:00.000+01:00

How this topic is related to Eclipse ? Well, not directly. But as Eclipse is a community we should take care of each other. I belief at least some of you will find this information really useful.
Link to my blog's record: http://frankfurt-days.blogspot.com/2008/02/4th-february-world-cancer-day.html
Direct link to the presentation about cancer's prevention methods: http://www.cs.put.poznan.pl/bmichalik/cancer/4th_February.pdf

Cut the tail

2008-02-02T15:49:00.000+01:00

As Chris has posted the oldest bug in PDE is fixed. Maybe this is a good starting point for cutting the tail ? The next in queue are:

Maybe there are not most interesting ones but there is a lot more bellow id 100000.
So let's start slicing the tail :)

Btw. the oldest bug is 30.

OSGi happy family: UserAdmin

2008-01-31T11:23:00.000+01:00

Bundles, wiring, life-cycle and services architecture are not the only part of OSGi specification. Although they're "Core", standard covers also a number of services that we most likely gonna need - like HTTP, position (GPS!), preferences or user management.

User Admin Service comes into action whenever our application is run by multiple users with different privileges. It brings notion of Roles, Users and Groups, who have their properties and credentials. User can perform actions on behalf of selected role if he's one of that role's basic members and has all memberships required by that role. Authorization code looks like this:


User user = (User) UserAdmin.getUser("jacek");
Authorization auth = userAdmin.getAuthorization(user);
if (auth.hasRole("CVS_USERS")) {
 // ...
}

Naturally users can come and go at any time, thus we're given actually two services: one for querying users (UserAdmin) and another to track any changes (UserAdminListener).
Generic specification allows for wide range of implementations behind UserAdmin. Equinox's one lays on Preferences (yet another OSGi service).
However UserAdmin is functionally very similar to JAAS, JAAS depends on JDK1.3 which is still to high barier for OSGi.

On my way to become commiter - homework

2008-01-16T14:22:00.000+01:00

This post I dedicate to every fellow working day and night to get commiter status.

There is a time in every eclipser life, when one cannot hide longer in the shadow of internal packages, and has to stand firmly in the snihe of public API.

But one has to be very carefull, because demons of history sleep in Eclipse API. And if someone tries to influence their doze, will be punished.

There is only one way to survive: be faithful to the Eclipse tradition - do not try to break rules.

If you do not know am I talking about - please take a look into eclipse wiki. That's your homework (and mine too).

Just to give you prove that deamons do not sleep:
I have fixed once bug 205194 and that was serious crime which I have not even realized. Then the beast come to me.

Please do not follow my path.

Cheers ;).

Do bugs go to heaven?

2008-01-15T21:06:00.000+01:00

As we're on fuzzies subject, I wonder how many of you still fill them when you mark bugs FIXED. Probably not many, I heard it's a daily ritual for committers to click FIXED button. :) But what happens after that single preciously investigated being disappears from our Mylyn task list, Firefox history or finally current Milestone horizon?
Well, bugs don't end up their lives in heaven. They sleep buried deeply in unmaintained CVS branch and patiently wait for their time.

Some people happen to work with applications based on Eclipse 3.0 or 3.1 and, among all good they produce, they accidentally bring past into life. Here I come into action with magic Spell Book bugzilla and it's always such a relief to see spells like "fixed in v20030501", or "problem was class XYZ.getFoo() which I have just updated" instead of incorrect Target Milestone field or meaningless "Fixed".
And I'll not mention some EMF gurus who seem to have fun leaving beautiful trace of their code transparency. EMF bugs go to heaven :)

Eclipse Con 2008

2008-01-04T17:01:00.001+01:00

I will be there!

:D

Poznan Demo Camp video

2007-12-20T18:17:00.000+01:00

If you want to see what has happened during Eclipse Demo Camp in Poznan you have a chance. Please visit Polish Eclipse Forum or use this direct link. All presentations are in Polish. Many thanks to GIK for these videos ;)

Time to say goodbye

2007-12-20T17:55:00.000+01:00

Do you know this song?

As the year is about to end and my contract in IBM is almost over, there is some space for summary. It was great time to work with my team (thank you guys) and within the community (thank you community ;) ). My Eclipse skills has developed as well as my Eclipse friendships. But the work was only a part of my life. I am also Phd student and in February im going to Frankfurt am Main for exchange program.
What does it mean for me in Eclipse context? I don't want stop working on Eclipse (especially now when I've started working on PDE more intensively). Maybe I will try find some challenging work in Frankfurt or focus only on PDE development. We will see what time brings :) Once again I want to say "Thank you very much" Piet, Asia, Łukasz, Chris, Kuba and Jacek.

The time has come :)

2007-12-14T23:54:00.000+01:00

Yup, is there :) finally new Eclispe 3.4M4 is ready to download

Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan

2007-11-30T14:15:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday second part of Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan took place. This time about 40 people came to listen to two very interesting presentations. Jacek Pospychala, who was the first speaker, was explaining "How big OSGi fan can be?". Jacek gave us some basic information about OSGi, Equinox and showed us a demo of the OSGi possibilities. The second speaker was Lukasz Olek, who presented UC Workbench project as an example of Eclipse RCP. Both presentations were great and the audience looked very interested in the topics.
We would like to thank all the participants and speakers for their time and effort.
And for the end you can look at our pictures from the event:

Eclipse 3.4 update site

2007-11-27T15:38:00.000+01:00

I have tried to install several items to my brand new eclipse installation, and I was pretty annyoied that "Ganymede Discovery Site" does not work (404, not found).

But luckily there is an update site

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/ganymede/staging/

that keep everything in one place. I think that will simplyfy installation process :-).

The first part of Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan

2007-11-23T12:45:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday we had the first meeting of Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan. We had two presentations, both of which were very good (inspite of some technical problems with the network connection) and I think that everyone could find something interesting. We were suprised by the number of people, who came - over 80 people made us proud that Eclipse is so popular in Poznan.
Some pictures from the event:

Chistopher and Bartek were speaking about Eclipse Way.

There were over 80 attendees.

Katarzyna with Mateusz were presenting g-Eclipse project.

I would like to thank everyone who attended and invite for the next meeting of Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan, which will take place on next Wednesday.

Adding bugzilla task in Mylyn

2007-11-22T10:45:00.000+01:00

This is rather a question than tutorial. When I am browsing through Eclipse bugzilla there are some bugs interesting for me. As I am Mylyn user I want add this task to the one of my Task view's categories. I spend some time on looking for a option "Add repository task with a specific ID" and I didn't find one. But I've found a way to add a task with a couple of steps:

Search for a task with a given ID

Move the task to one of your categories

Is there any easier way ?

Eclipse Build will wake me up tomorrow

2007-11-22T10:10:00.000+01:00

Have you noticed? New option on build schedule page is now available.
You can now import build info to your google calendar or use calendar form the build page. This is a great chance to make your life integrated continuously ;). Eclipse night build in Polish time zone takes place at 6.10am so if you have problems with morning getting up you can use google events.

The last step is to find a nice ring tone for my SMS signal :D

Eclipse-LazyStart and testing plugins

2007-11-16T09:26:00.000+01:00

Once again I've made a stupid mistake. I was supposed to add some functionality, and I've started from testing what I did. To my surprise the plugin's start method, i was depended on (lets call it org.hsia), wasn't called. It was called during the normal launch.
My first move was changing org.hsia Eclipse-LazyStart to false.
"The Eclipse-LazyStart header is used to specify if a bundle should be started before the first class or resource is accessed from that bundle" so, I thought if lazy start is false plugin will be started during the platform start - wrong (thanks Chris).
The problem in my case was that I didn't call any of the org.hsia classes. Solution in this case is simple, set org.hsia Eclipse-LazyStart to true and call:


@BeforeClass
public static void setUpEditor() {
    //force Editor activator to be called
     MetricsEditorPlugin.getPlugin();
}

in the test.
Why I've posted that. Maybe you have the same problem, and somentimes is better to lern on sbd else mistakes :)

Eclipse Demo Camp in Poznan - next week!

2007-11-15T11:56:00.000+01:00

We, as IBM Support Center for Eclipse, together with members of g-Eclipse project decided to organize Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan on the Poznan University of Technology. We split the event into two meetings, during which funs of Eclipse can meet and discuss about their projects and about Eclipse in general. The list of people who want to come is growing so we hope that every chair in the room will be taken. We will try to post here all the interesting thoughts we will have after the event.

Eclipse Forum PL

2007-11-12T12:55:00.000+01:00

We are glad to announce that Polish Forum for Eclipse Enthusiasts has just started. The idea behind that was to activate Eclipse users from Poland. Feel welcome to contribute.
Please visit eclipseforum.org.pl and sign in.

How to find other versions of Eclipse?

2007-11-12T08:57:00.000+01:00

Some time ago I was looking for the new Eclipse milestone in order to download it and give it a try. I went to the Eclipse download page and saw the new download page everyone knew (it was introduced with Eclipse Europa by Eclipse Packaging Project). I like this packaging idea, but I had no idea how to get the newest milestone of Eclipse. Fotunately Bartek Michalik told me how to achieve it. Two days later my colleague Christopher Daniel was facing the same problem, so I think it's worth saying how to get to the page with the latest builds.
If you go to the Eclipse download page you will find the Find out more... link (this was the hardest thing to find and I think that the text "Find out more" can mislead people):
On the next page follow the All versions link:
And here it is!

Eclipse Summit 2007

2007-10-08T16:47:00.000+01:00

I think there is no words more needed.

PDE enhancement

2007-10-02T15:20:00.000+01:00

As you probably know we've just finished Eclipse Summer School workshops. It was great time, but now we are back to work. Recently I'm working on new PDE enhancement called "Convert jars to Plug-in Project". How it works, you can select jars in your project and transform them into plug-in project. You can also decide to change references in other project, that contains that jar's, to the new project.

It still needs some work but you can take a look and put your comments in bugzilla.

But this is only context to issue I want to share with you :).
As we all know laziness is a bliss and good programmer is a lazy one. I decided to put it into life when working on this bug. I needed to filter a list of jar files to finds a duplicates. Two jars are the same when have the same manifests (this is only an assumption for this project). This is a great occasion to use TreeSet. I've written a comparator for jar files but I didn't know what to do when two manifests are different. I followed the rule from the beginning of this paragraph and decide that when two manifest are different then result of comparison is jar1.hashCode() - jar2.hasCode(). Of course it couldn't work and I've spent a hour to find what is going on.
So I decide to change my paradigm of good programmer: "good programmer is lazy one but have to know what he is doing".

Custom Property Source for EMF generated RCP application

2007-10-02T08:02:00.000+01:00

Have you ever tried to generate your application using EMF? If yes, you have probably noticed, that EMF puts standard editors for properties. For testing purposes this is enough, but for commercial application... well... answer yourself.

In this post I will show you how to generate simple date editor for the EMF application.
Here is the model:

As you see, it is not very complicated. If we generate RCP appliaction we will receive something like that:

and additional three plugins in your workspace (.edit, .editor, and .tests).

So we start to work.

In the pluging .editor we open our application Editor, and then, in the method getPropertySheetPage() we replace the

propertySheetPage.setPropertySourceProvider(new AdapterFactoryContentProvider(adapterFactory));

with

propertySheetPage.setPropertySourceProvider(new CustomizedAdapterFactoryContentProvider(adapterFactory));

Such a class does not exists, so we have to create it (it should extend AdapterFactoryContentProvider) and override method createPropertySource:


protected IPropertySource createPropertySource(Object object,
 IItemPropertySource itemPropertySource) {
            return new CustomizedPropertySource(object, itemPropertySource);
}

We do not have CustomizedPropertySource yet, so we create one, and override
createPropertyDescriptor() method:


protected IPropertyDescriptor createPropertyDescriptor(
IItemPropertyDescriptor itemPropertyDescriptor) {
      return new CustomizedPropertyDescriptor(object, itemPropertyDescriptor);
}

We do not have one. We have to create it and override createPropertyEditor, finally;):


public CellEditor createPropertyEditor(Composite composite) {
    CellEditor result = super.createPropertyEditor(composite);
     if(result == null) return result;
     EClassifier eType =         ((EStructuralFeature)itemPropertyDescriptor.getFeature(object)).getEType();
   if (eType instanceof EDataType) {
      EDataType eDataType = (EDataType) eType;
      if(eDataType.getInstanceClass() == Date.class){
         result = new ExtendedDialogCellEditor(composite, getEditLabelProvider()){
              protected Object openDialogBox(Control cellEditorWindow) {
                  final DateTime dateTime[] = new DateTime[1];
                  final Date[] date = new Date[1];
                  Dialog d = new Dialog(cellEditorWindow.getShell()){
                      protected Control createDialogArea(Composite parent) {
                          Composite dialogArea = (Composite) super.createDialogArea(parent);
                          dateTime[0] = new DateTime(dialogArea, SWT.CALENDAR);
                          dateTime[0].addSelectionListener(new SelectionAdapter(){
                               public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent e) {
                                    Date dateValue = new Date();
                                    dateValue.setYear(dateTime[0].getYear());
                                    dateValue.setMonth(dateTime[0].getMonth());
                                    dateValue.setDate(dateTime[0].getDay());
                                    date[0] = dateValue;
                                    super.widgetSelected(e);
                                }
                                   });
                          return dialogArea;
                      }
                   };
                 d.setBlockOnOpen(true);
                 d.open();
                 if(d.getReturnCode() == Dialog.OK){
                     return date[0];
                 }
                 return null;
             }
               };
        }
   }
      return result;
}

In this method we provide date property editor, but also we have to check, if the property is editable and if it is really a date, because our method will take care about all properties. So, if this is not a date, we pass everything to the super implementation.

And voila :) Here it is:

So, to sum up: you modify your editor to use subclassed AdapterFactoryContentProvider that will return subclassed PropertySource that will return subclassed PropertyDescriptor that will create your desired cell editor.

Hope that will help you :).

Tips & Tricks for debugging in Eclipse

2007-10-01T13:10:00.000+01:00

During the Eclipse Summer School, which took place last week at our university, I had a chance to be a tutor. On Thurdsay I had classes about debugging in Eclipse. People were very eager to learn new things about the Eclipse debugger, so they asked me questions, thanks to which I had a chance to remind (and learn) myself some tricks in the debugger . So I thought that maybe not everyone knew about new features available in Eclipse 3.3 or even about features that had been in Eclipse for ages. Here are the features I find most interesting (and not so obvious):

1) Debug details formatter

When you debug your application you probably use the Variables view. One of the disadvantages is that you cannot see the data inside complex objects (unless they implement toString() method). Eclipse allows you to write your own formatter for displaying the content you are interested in. You can do it in the Eclipse preferences under Java->Debug->Detail Formatters.

Lets consider the following class:

When you want to check the value of the an object of this class during the debugging session you have to expand the object and inspect the value of all it’s parts. (see the picture below).

Let’s write our own formatter:

And now in the Variables view we can see that the person object is shown differently:

If you want to see the formatter in the labels for variables you have to select the following option in the Eclipse preferences:

This allows you to see the result of your formatter in the value field of the Variables view:

I find this option very useful also for the standard classes (e.g. ArrayList), then instead of:

I can see:

2) Toggling class breakpoints on the class without the source code

When you want to stop the execution of your application in the moment when some of your class is loaded by the class loader you can use the class breakpoints (just toggle the breakpoint on the line when the declaration of the class begins). But what about the situation when you want the same behavior when a class, which you don’t have the sources for, is loaded? How to toggle such a breakpoint without the source code? Actually this was the question from one of our students and I had no idea how to answer it. Fortunately Jacek was in the room with me and he found the answer very quickly. You just have to go to the main menu and choose Run->Add Class Load Breakpoint…

3) Displaying all references of an object (new in Eclipse 3.3)

Sometimes it is worth to see all references of some object. How to achieve this? There are two ways of doing this. If you want to display references of the specific object, right click on the object in the Variables view and choose All References. The popup window will appear with all references. If you want to see all references of all available objects go to the menu in the Variables view and choose Java->Show References.

4) Displaying all instances of a class (new in Eclipse 3.3)

If you want to see all instances of a class just mark this class in the Java editor and choose All Instanced from the context menu.