Lately there’s been a few questions on IRC about how to open editors on different file extensions. For example, if you had a .php5 file and your PHP editor only opened on .php, that can make you sad 🙁
Never fear, to add a file association with an editor is fairly easy in Eclipse. Simply open up the preferences and search for “File Assocations.” In there, add your file extension and choose your editor.
I’m so filled with joy that ECF 1.0.2 was just released last night. To grab it, go to the downloads page or point to the update site. The release contains quite a few fixes, but I have to admit, a lot of the fun stuff will be coming in 1.1 🙂 Thanks to all the participants in BugDay that helped out, a good portion of the fixes in this release came from BugDay. It was really great to see the Eclipse community support the project with contributions in the form of bug fixes and ideas.
I meant to blog about this earlier, but I was in Italy with limited Internet access. People that know me personally, know that I tend to use the quote “enterprise web development is so 90’s.” There’s very few things in life that have turned me off from programming than the whole JEE stack. EJBs and everything around it can go rot in a fire.
Ok, now that I’m done my rant, back to my original discussion topic of how web development isn’t so 90’s anymore. Certain people have seen the light and started to move web development to the world of bundles.
I had first hand experience with this a few weeks ago when Dejan said “Chris, update test cases are failing, can you take a look at this bug” (note, this was about 5 minutes before he signed off and went on vacation for 3 weeks :P). As a bundle developer, I can use familiar concepts like extensions and extension points to write web applications. See the Equinox HTTP Quickstart guide for some simple examples. I think within a couple years, this will be common place as vendors move to create tools around these concepts. I mean, application servers are already running on top of OSGi, the next logical step is that these web applications will be packaged as bundles. I’m sure that the Equinox Provisioning work will make it even easier to deploy these applications on servers because this was another pain point when working with web applications.
I’m in the process of writing a tutorial around these ideas, but Jeff and Simon’s short article is a good starting point.
Oh, I forgot to point towards the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) project which is doing stuff that is so 2010 😛
In spirit of the BostonEDGE, I’m creating a new Eclipse user group in Austin called AustinEDGE (Austin Eclipse Developer’s Group and Exchange).
Austin is a great town with a lot of good Eclipse talent (there’s people that work on Equinox, PDE, Higgins, ATF, eRCP and more). There are companies like IBM, Motorola, Nokia (nice offices downtown guys!) in town that do Eclipse work. However, we lack an outlet to come together over some frosty beverages and talk. If you’re in Austin and interested, please join the google group and let me know. If I have enough interested people, I’ll get things going and setup a talk and a place. If you have a preference on the talk, please state your interest on the google group.
Some people may ask why I don’t work with the local JUG… well, I tried and their policies upset me (asking an open-source project to pay sponsorship fees is outrageous). These type of meetings should be simple, free, non-commercial focused and fully open. If you want to give a talk, you simply ask. If you want to talk about your product, cool, you just get to provide food and beverages 🙂
Sorry for the delay in writing up the results, but I’ve been on a plane and without my luggage for the last 36 hours (albeit in beautiful Verona) Now to the results…
Thanks to everyone who participated in BugDay this time around. For some statistics:
For the first time around, I’m very pleased with the results. To be honest, I just expected me participating in bugday and maybe fixing a WTP bug in good spirit (all while Wassim makes fun of me for the idea of a bugday). However, the community turned out and fixed issues for the purpose of just helping out or fixed issues that have long bothered them in Eclipse. I think the willingness to help just reflects on the great community we have in Eclipse and also shows that the open-source model of development can be very beneficial if done right.
There were some lessons I also learned:
Thanks all again. The next bugday will be August 31st 2007. If you’re interested in participating, check out the FAQ and make your interest known on the wiki (or on relevant bugs).
Ok, I swear, this is the last update of BugDay I’ll do before it actually occurs. Looking at the picture below, there’s been quite a few participants and projects already (however, I wish there were more projects):
Oh, I also updated the FAQ to show how committers should do proper attribution for the contributor and follow Eclipse’s IP process at the same time (adding their face to your website is completely optional ;p).
On a side note, the WTP project needs some love… noone has signed up yet for a WTP bug 🙁 If noone does, I’ll do one tomorrow. How hard can it be to move something into an import/export wizard or italicize something by default?
I just wanted to share something cool that has come out of bugday so far!
But first, let me tell you a story! Have you ever worked on your cool plug-in project or product, drank a few glasses of wine (or some fine coffee porter) to see this in your project explorer view:
External Plug-in Libraries…? Where did that come from? How many glasses of wine did I have? Where am I? I don’t remember creating that project.
Well, I have good news, you didn’t create that project directly. If you ever took advantage of adding plug-ins to Java Search (which a lot of people do via the Plug-ins view), PDE indirectly created this project to help the awesome JDT search the plug-in(s) you’re interested in. I’ve always wanted this project hidden by default because it confused me as a new user and it will probably confuse other new users (some of which will probably delete that project when they see it anyway).
So now back to bugday. Peter Friese submitted a patch and finally fixed this problem. There is now a filter that is on by default:
Thanks Peter and check this out in the next I-build!
Just to let people know, Scott Lewis and I will be doing a webinar on ECF next Tuesday. We plan to go through a lot demos as part of the webinar as ECF has a lot of cool things inside of the project that are hard to find out about from the outside. We’ll also go through a cool little sample application that was developed for the webinar. I’ll be mainly channeling Chris Recoskie from the CDT Webinar as the guy who helps out on the chat while Scott does most of the demoing 🙂
If you want to see anything in particular, let us know and we’ll try to accommodate!
Through my daily browsing of the Eclipse newsgroups, I saw a post about how do detect whether a bundle is running headless. I had to do something similar several months ago, but I figure I would post a solution for people whoever come across this issue in their bundle-development lives.
The gist of the solution is to detect whether the SWT bundle is installed and running. Here’s a basic snippet on how to do this:
Bundle b = Platform.getBundle("org.eclipse.swt");
if (b==null || b.getState() != Bundle.ACTIVE) {
System.out.println("sweet, headless mode!");
}
If you don’t care for the dependency on the Platform class and the bundle it comes from, you can do a “pure OSGi” solution of using PackageAdmin. I recommend using getBundles(…) from PackageAdmin to get access to the SWT bundle to do a similar check.
That’s it… I’m not sure if a more elegant solution exists.
The first Eclipse BugDay hasn’t even started, but it looks like it’s going to be successful. Thank you to Peter Friese who has been on a role tackling PDE bugday bugs.
Also, Darin Swanson from the Platform Ant team recently announced to the world his participation in bugday (check out the Ant bugs).
Just wanted to let people know that bugday is coming up this Friday and thanks to all for helping out and participating!