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November 6, 2007
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Pulse in Pictures

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Pulse launched today. What is Pulse? Well, it’s quite a few things but let me tell you a story about it in pictures.

I’ve been toying with Pulse the past few days as the Genuitec folks were kind enough to invite me to test it. I managed to setup a few ‘profiles’ with it. Think of profiles as an easy to configure set of plug-ins (or more appropriately bits of functionality). I have two profiles:

I launched my C/C++ profile but found that it lacked Mylyn so I was naturally devastated. Instead of going the classic update manager route… I launched the Pulse Explorer to see what’s going on:

Yap, looks like no Mylyn in my C/C++ profile. Let’s see if I can find Mylyn in the software catalog:

Sweet, I found Mylyn, let’s add it to my C/C++ profile:

Now let’s run the C/C++ profile:

Bingo, I have my C/C++ tools along with Mylyn:

That’s Pulse in pictures for you. I see a lot of potential in Pulse as revolutionizing the way the Eclipse community manages their plug-in install base.

However, I have some worries. Pulse seems to be backed by only one company currently and to appeal to the greater community, they may have to open up more. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that in order to add software to the catalog, you have to go through an autocratic process. I understand that the process may help ensure only quality items end up in the catalog, but opening it up to everyone similar to the Netbeans Plug-in Portal is a step in the right direction.

Other than that, hats off to the guys behind Pulse for putting together an excellent tool and service.

November 5, 2007
2 Comments

Hibachi

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The Eclipse Hibachi project was formally announced today.

It looks like they’ll be cooking up some good Ada tooling 🙂

November 2, 2007
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Eclipse 3.4M3 Out The Door

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Eclipse 3.4M3 is out.

Check out the new and noteworthy.

Enjoy!

November 1, 2007
2 Comments

Eclipse and OLE

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If you ever wanted to learn how to integrate things like Microsoft Excel in your Eclipse RCP applications, Lars Vogel has an article out there with some nice and easy to understand examples.

November 1, 2007
16 Comments

Plug-in Spy, RCP and Eclipse 3.3

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I’ve been asked a few questions about the Plug-in Spy (ALT+SHIFT+F1) but haven’t had time to reply, but now I do so here’s my chance.

Does the Plug-in Spy work in RCP?

Yes, but you’ll miss out on the fancy hyperlinking… instead all classes are resolved to their fully qualified name. Outside the normal RCP set of dependencies, the spy depends on org.eclipse.ui.forms which is fairly minimal and is probably in your RCP application already. Here’s a quick screenshot of the famous RCP Mail example from PDE with two extra dependencies added (org.eclipse.ui.forms and org.eclipse.pde.runtime which contains the spy):

Does the Plug-in Spy work in Eclipse 3.3?

It should, it doesn’t depend on anything from the 3.4 code base. I’d just build your own copy of the spy from HEAD and export it using the PDE wizards.

Does the Plug-in Spy work in Eclipse 3.2?

No, it takes advantage of some things found in the Platform Command Framework which made its debut in the 3.3 version of Eclipse. In theory the spy could work in 3.2, but it would require a rewrite and that’s something I’m not interested or have time for right now. There are bigger fish to fry in PDE at the moment to make plug-in development truly a first-class experience.

Happy spying!

October 31, 2007
2 Comments

Contributors and PDE 3.4M3

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Eclipse 3.4M3 is coming out soon and with that, I thought I’d offer everyone a sneak peek at what’s going on from the PDE side of things. However, before I do that, I’d like to mention that for the first time, PDE had more bugs fixed from contributors than committers. So I first like to thank the following people for their contributions this milestone:

In terms of what was done for this milestone, let me show one of my favorite ones:

It’s now possible to refactor extension points and have it automatically update referencing extensions found in the workspace. This was a bit painful before if you had to do it by hand and happened quite frequently to me because I’d define an extension point like thing and forgot to pluralize it into things.

For the rest, you’ll have to wait until Friday 🙂

October 29, 2007
6 Comments

XML Tools Component

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Just to keep people in the loop, the Webtools project is going to be incubating a new XML Development Tools component. The goal of this new component is turn Eclipse into a first-class XML development tool. It will include contributions from the popular EclipseXSLT and X-Assist projects. From my perspective, it’s really exciting to see Eclipse community members coming together to make the XML development space a better place in Eclipse.

October 29, 2007
6 Comments

Disabling Bundles

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

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

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

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

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

October 26, 2007
12 Comments

Greatbugs

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Kim Horne reminded me today about greatbugs. I don’t know if Eclipse contributors know this, but it brings us committers such joy when a bug comes with detailed steps to reproduce, a patch and a test case. It’s a trifecta of bug squashing goodness.

It saves committers a ton of time if there is an easy way to reproduce the problem and a solution attached. In PDE, we recently filed a bug to do some refactoring around project operations and in the back of our minds thought that this type of stuff would never get addressed. Lo and behold, Les Jones contributed an excellent patch and test case to boot for the enhancement. Les will make his way to the PDE Hall of Fame soon 🙂

On a side note, Ian Bull (PDE Incubator committer) squeezed in an enhancement for 3.4M3 today. It will now be easier to work with your launch configurations when dealing with thousands of bundles. By the way, someone should hire Ian, I hear he’s finishing his PhD soon and I will be personally devastated if he doesn’t find a good job.

October 23, 2007
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Eclipse October BugDay

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Just a friendly reminder that the Eclipse October BugDay is coming up this Friday. We already have a few awesome participants, but it would be nice to have some more. If you’re interested in helping PDE out this time around, we recently enhanced the error log view by partitioning out log statements by session:

Cool huh? It would even be cooler if the current session was highlighted.

If bolding text isn’t your thing, here are some other bugs from PDE:

  • [142422] – Update class references in dependent plugin.xmls
  • [195433] – Junit plugin test configuration should use project’s JRE by default
  • [190717] – [Target][Editors] Target editor, content page: Features tab should not show Add Working Set etc
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