One of the oldest PDE bugs came to a close a few days ago. In the next I-build, you should notice that the Eclipse launch configuration has slightly changed. It now supports clearing your workspace or just your log if you desire. This is a small and subtle change, but useful for people who want to keep all their settings but just have their log cleared. Enjoy.
Tomorrow’s blog post will feature the PDE Plug-in Dependencies View Gone Wild.
The Ada Development Tools (ADT) project has been announced. This is great for those old school Ada developers who want to relive the glory 🙂 I’m not sure who is more annoying, Ada or Smalltalk developers when it comes to declaring the greatest language in existence 🙂
Jokes aside, this is just another interesting community that Eclipse is starting work its way into. When I was at NASA GSFC for a brief time, I actually saw Ada live in action. Ada has a strong presence inside governmental areas and it’ll be good to see another group of people smile when they have Eclipse-based tools helping with their day jobs.
I was recently working with the Apache Commons Httpclient library to move it into the Orbit project. Mylar (and other projects) was looking forward to using this library out of Orbit directly instead of including it as an additional library (yuck!). Eugene Kuleshov recently commented about how painful it would be for developers to work with Orbit bundles because developers would have to grab bundles from another repositories in order to get their workspace compiling. Well, let me introduce you to something called Project Set Files. They are a form of black magic that comes from the Team “team.” PSFs allow you to quickly materialize a workspace and are commonly found in “releng” projects (for Eclipse projects that know about them). I highly recommend using them 🙂
The Eclipse 3.3 release cycle has gone really well for the PDE team. Considering the relatively small size of the team, we’ve managed to fix a ton of bugs and add a plethora of new enhancements (from people who didn’t submit patches btw ;p). The PDE motto has always been, “We do tooling but our business is people.” With that stated, the PDE team is entering the polish phase of the release cycle and we implemented things known as “theme weeks.”
This week’s theme is “anything product related” needs to be polished. Next week is primarily all things cheat-sheets. We are inviting the community to comment and file new bugs that they would like solved before 3.3 closes. We will pay special attention to these requests and try to fit them in the plan as we understand that PDE plays an important in the future growth of Eclipse.
It looks like 3.3M6 was finally published. The New and Noteworthy is out for all to digest 😉 Here are my biased favorites:
> wget http://planet.eclipse.org/planet/opml.xml
> grep 'outline' opml.xml | wc -l
> 100
I’m happy to announce we are finally syndicating 100 bloggers on PlanetEclipse (maybe not 100 unique individuals since Wayne Beaton has 10 blogs on Eclipse ;p). I think this is great news for the growing Eclipse community… if you’re out there in the community and want to have your voice heard, why not be syndicated by the planet? We all can learn from each other instead of crying foul during march madness!
In what probably marks the start of the largest deployment of Eclipse technology ever, Lotus Notes 8 recently went into public beta. There’s a pretty good article out there on developerWorks that gives you an overview of how the client was built on top of Eclipse.
The big news in Lotus Notes V8 is that the Notes V8 client encapsulates all the code that is Lotus Notes within the Eclipse environment. This move puts Lotus Notes on an open-source Java-based platform. Originally created as an integrated application development environment, its open, plug-in-based architecture has made Eclipse itself the foundation for rich client platform development. Lotus Notes V8 is built on Lotus Expeditor, IBM’s universal managed-client software, which, in turn, is built on Eclipse.
In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.
Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?
Not sure how many people know this, but I discovered this accidentally this weekend. When launching Eclipse with -console, you can specify a port which you can telnet into (ie., ./eclipse -console 85). When you telnet into the specified port, you get a familiar OSGi console 🙂
