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June 10, 2007
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Launchy and Megaman

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If you’re like me and have to work in Windows sometimes (yes, unfortunately products have to run on Windows), why not make it more enjoyable? I tend to have a ton of Eclipse installs and found a neat little application to make my life much easier. It’s called Launchy and lets you quickly browse folders (amongst other things). It’s a small application that is bound to a simple shortcut, when launched, it pops up with something like the screenshot below.

It’s also smart enough to go through your Internet history too.

For me this is convenient as it allows me to browse and launch all my Eclipses quickly. This is my favorite application of the year so far (last year it went to the Megaman effect which is awesome too). Maybe you can use the two applications in combination.

June 8, 2007
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Trolltech Joins the Party

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It looks like Trolltech is joining the Eclipse party with the release of their new Qt Jambi software. This is good news and provides more validation that Eclipse is the right direction to go if you’re looking to build tools for your clients. It seems the Trolltech guys love the SWT_AWT bridge too! Now only if they would help kick that QTe eRCP port out the door, but that may be too much to ask now 😉

(Thanks for Ahtik and Remy Suen for pointing this out on IRC)

June 7, 2007
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Creating an OSGi bundle with PDE

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In response to Glyn’s post, I figure I would show people how to create a ‘hello world’ bundle using PDE (I cry these days if I ever see someone setting up their classpath ;p).

  • File->New->Project

  • Select Plug-in project

  • Make sure the target platform points to Equinox

  • Select the Hello OSGi template

  • Click Finish and we’re done. Feel free to launch using PDE’s facilities

June 4, 2007
4 Comments

A Blast from the Past

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I’ve been updating an old article and it’s amazing to see how far Eclipse has come since then. I mean, just look at some screenshots… getting back to the article though, as an Eclipse developer, is there something you wish you would’ve known when you started working with Eclipse? I have my own ideas, but I would appreciate any feedback from the community as everyone has their own biases 🙂

May 30, 2007
4 Comments

Eclipse Forum India

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I have to say that I’ve been very impressed so far with the Eclipse Forum India conference. The people are very welcoming and kind. During Day 1 of the conference, Wassim and I gave a full day tutorial on RCP/Plug-in development which was well received. To my complete surprise when I asked my standard question of who has developed plug-ins and used Eclipse before, well over half of the room raised their hand (~150 people). The audience’s general Eclipse savvy made for a very interesting Q&A 🙂

The following day, I gave an introductory talk on eRCP that went well. Most of the people in the audience didn’t really have an embedded background, but I hope my message around reusing Eclipse skills to develop mobile applications got through.

Our beloved Mik Kersten gave a talk on Mylar and his new venture Tasktop.

On the whole, I think Eclipse has a surprisingly strong presence in India. In one of the talks, CodeGear’s chief evangelist (David Intersimone) asked a large audience how many people use Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Emacs/VIM (hi Ed). I would say easily 80% of the audience used Eclipse and the rest of the audience was equally split between IntelliJ and Netbeans (except for that one guy in the back who used VIM).

I would like to say thank you to the conference organizers (especially Dilip, Masoud and Neeru) for a job well done and many thanks for your hospitality. I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference! I’m now off to find an elephant for Wassim to ride, because apparently this is on his “things to be done before I die list.”

May 25, 2007
8 Comments

Final Notes Beta

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When I’m not producing “Blair Witch Project” scary patches, I tend to follow the ins and outs of the Lotus community to see what they are doing with Eclipse. Well, recently IBM Lotus announced the last beta for the new Lotus Notes client that’s all built on Eclipse technology. I’ve been using the client internally for awhile now and always get giddy when I can launch Notes and get an OSGi console.

Why is this important for the Eclipse community? It will probably mark the largest deployment of Eclipse-based technology (definitely outside the developer space). This is a good sign that Eclipse is growing and has shed its image as only a tooling platform.

The only question is what’s next?

May 23, 2007
4 Comments

PDE meets Bangalore

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Wassim and I from PDE will be at Eclipse Forum India (EFI) next week giving conference attendees a full-day of PDE love 🙂

If anyone at the conference wants to sit down with us and chat about PDE/Eclipse (over an optional frosty beverage of course) please let us know. At the last EclipseCon, the PDE team heard good ideas (particularly from those demanding Band XI guys ;p) that we incorporated into the 3.3 release of PDE. We would love to do the same at EFI (for 3.4).

On a side note, as a committer representative, I would love to hear what issues or suggestions Eclipse committers in the area have. At Eclipse Forum Europe, I heard some complaints which I acted on and would like to do the same at EFI. Feel free to drop me a line and we can chat.

May 18, 2007
2 Comments

Small Launching Change

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In the PDE team, we had this running joke that every Eclipse-related debate eventually degenerates into talking about the SWT_AWT bridge (this was true two EclipseCons ago, now every debate ends up talking about Provisioning/Update). Well, to make those SWT_AWT guys happy (especially on the Mac), we made a small change (fix) to how Eclipse applications are launched in PDE. In the past, we used to implicitly pass certain arguments (os,ws,arch,nl) to the framework, this is no longer true. In 3.3RC1, you’ll notice these arguments located in the program arguments box (explicitly).

We fought this change for awhile because in my eyes, it slightly complicates the launching user interface, but it was necessary to keep everyone happy. PDE will automatically migrate your old launch configurations (using some clever Debug APIs) so there’s no worry 🙂

May 14, 2007
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The Welcome Framework and Europa

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That zany UA team was at it again with a new feature for Eclipse 3.3 which I think Eclipse projects should take advantage of. The feature provides you a way to introduce your project to a user when the project is installed say via an update site. A good example of this is what I’ve done with ECF.

Basically when ECF gets installed, you get the welcome framework notifying you that a new “feature” has been installed by highlighting a relevant welcome entry. It would be nice if all projects part of the Europa release would do this (however, this now raises the question whether we need some coordination between projects to be more careful about the wording that goes on the welcome page). Mylar? CDT? TPTP? Who is in?

Also, notice that the ECF welcome entry is missing a beautiful icon. It would be great if someone in the community would donate some of their time and provide a welcome icon. That would be fantastic and I would owe that person a frosty beverage, please use this bug as a point of submission (if you want to create more icons, here’s another bug, you’ll save Russia from blindness if you do ;p).

May 11, 2007
2 Comments

Equinox Console and grep/sort

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I just noticed an email fly by on the equinox-dev mailing list about a possible contribution for grep/sort commands to the equinox console. For me, this is great news, I mean, this is even better than the last episode of House.

As an afterthought, grep was one of the commands I thought to code for the article I wrote awhile back on the equinox console, but I settled for the much simpler uname 😉

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