I just like to make sure everyone saw John Arthorne’s mail about the review flag. It’s my hope more Eclipse projects pick up on this neat little feature, especially around this time in an Eclipse release.
Microsoft Help -> Eclipse Help
By Chris Aniszczyk
I came across this neat utility I thought I would share with everyone. If you have old Microsoft Help files laying around and want them to be used within the Eclipse help system, then this utility is for you!
It feels good to be dynamic
By Chris Aniszczyk
On catching up with my blog reading today, I came across a post by one of my good friends Bob Balfe. He links to an article by Peter Nehrer about dynamic plug-ins in Eclipse. I can’t stress enough how important this concept should be to an Eclipse developer. The current platform suffers from the case that certain plug-ins (bundles) aren’t dynamic aware causing the recommendation that Eclipse be restarted on every update (don’t mention apply changes, that popup should never exist in the first place). When we look past the 3.3 release and into a possible “4.0”, the concept of dynamic-aware plug-ins (bundles) is going to increase in importance.
I encourage all Eclipse developers to make their plug-ins dynamic aware and open bugs against projects that are lacking this functionality. Furthermore, when Netbeans decides to move to OSGi from its current module system (sometime early next year ;p), they may have a jump on us with all this crazy dynamic’ness.
EMF on Devices
By Chris Aniszczyk
I would just like to point people to a bug that I thought was really cool, a Peter Nehrer has prototyped EMF working on a much lower execution environment (meaning, EMF has the possibility to run on devices).
Hopefully the EMF team investigates this possibility after the Europa release, it’ll be a cool thing to watch.
Eclipse Spaces Project Review
By Chris Aniszczyk
Just letting people know that there is a review call of the Spaces project tomorrow. It looks like there is a diverse army of committers on the project so good things should happen. I’m going to try to attend the call to learn more about the project. These creation review calls are valuable opportunities to give input on a project or just learn about it.
Bug 170720 & UI Working Group
By Chris Aniszczyk
Recently, there has been some excitement around bug 170720. Andree Proulx just posted a well indexed list of just about every Eclipse project graphic out there. This seems like a perfect opportunity for the UI Working Group to do something useful by taking Andree’s work and making it consumable for the Eclipse community. However, I think my request may have fell on deaf ears.
What’s the purpose of a working group when noone responds to messages (you don’t count Eugene ;p)?
Updating Articles
By Chris Aniszczyk
One of my favorite things about the Eclipse community is the general wealth of information out there (on most topics). The problem with all this information is that it sometimes gets out of date. I recently updated an article for developerWorks that deals with a basic introduction to debugging with Eclipse. If you have any other articles you think need updating, let me know and I’ll put it on my queue.
By the way, I hear there’s this really good Swing/SWT article out there that needs to be posted 🙂
EMFT Query, Validation and Transaction Graduate
By Chris Aniszczyk
The EMFT Query, Validation and Transaction components have graduated to the EMF project. This is great news for people who want first class support for querying their models, validating their models (with pluggable validators!) and transactional support for their models. Now if someone cared about making EMF work on devices 😉
I don’t think people give EMF enough credit, it is probably the most used Eclipse component for commercial projects.
I’m going to retract my statement of “practically every large company using EMF,” that may have been too much. I’m working with the EMF team to see if we can come up with a list of adopters to really see how prevalent EMF is.
%#@*ing JVMs and Bundles
By Chris Aniszczyk
In case people are curious, Equinox is pretty smart (like that Tom Watson character) and has the ability to restrict a bundle to load via the Eclipse-PlatformFilter manifest attribute (btw, this functionality would be nice if it was standardized, any OSGi guys listening?). A long time ago, this was limited to OSGi specific properties, just recently Equinox allows for arbitrary and system properties. Now you can do something like this if your bundle only loved VMs from IBM (and by loved, I mean only worked on)
Eclipse-PlatformFilter: (java.vm.vendor=IBM Corporation)