PDE Build is somewhat of a black art in the Eclipse community. In my opinion, it’s something that we just lack tooling for. The situation is really no different than it was back in the day in creating an Eclipse RCP-based product without the product tooling (remember, it was an easy 58 steps and modifying a ton of config files ;p). Unfortunately, the tooling effort around PDE build has never really made it into plan, however, the greatness that is the Eclipse community seems to have started a solution: introducing PluginBuilder. I suggest people support or contribute to the project. In the future, I would like to even see something like it in PDE UI. Eclipse is you, right ;)?
Eclipse, Bugzilla and Flags
By Chris Aniszczyk
Denis‘ blog entry on upgrading to the new version of Bugzilla prompted me to post a comment on enabling flags in Eclipse’s bugzilla. Flags are widely used by the Mozilla team for things like approving patches from contributors and also just generally approving bugs for a specific release. I think Eclipse can benefit with flags for things like letting committers approve patches from contributors (or each other) and PMC approvals. Denis graciously opened a bug to discuss this (and a sample of what flags would look like in Eclipse bugzilla). Please comment if you have an opinion on the issue 🙂
Eclipse and Summer of Code
By Chris Aniszczyk
Eclipse is back for this year’s Google Summer of Code fest (thank you Phillipe). I highly recommend projects within Eclipse look at some of the ideas posted currently for Summer of Code and post their own thoughts. I also created an entry recently on the wiki for students to list their interests in working this summer for Eclipse’s Summer of Code presence (this may help match up students to projects and mentors). There’s also an IRC channel available for students to get some live feedback, #eclipse-soc. So come on Eclipse committers, come up with an idea and go find yourself a student, it’s fun 🙂
What’s better than free and quality student labor 😛 (j/k)!
Extension Registry is just another OSGi Service
By Chris Aniszczyk
After working with a colleague today regarding a problem with the extension registry, I saw a lack of domain knowledge on my colleague’s part. He thought the extension registry was some mythical beast that can be summoned via an incantation of Platform.getExtensionRegistry()… that thought is wrong. The Extension Registry is just another OSGi service (read about it in Neil Bartlett’s fantastic article). What this means is that you can simply interact with it like any other OSGi service…
// some simple snippets...
ServiceTracker tracker = new ServiceTracker(context,IExtensionRegistry.class.getName(), null);
tracker.open();
IExtensionRegistry registry =(IExtensionRegistry) tracker.getService();
There, no more Platform.getExtensionRegistry()… now it’s back to working off the 2 pounds gained being on the EclipseCon diet.
Dear Michael Scharf
By Chris Aniszczyk
This screenshot comes from the excellent (possibly the best) PDE tutorial at EclipseCon… it shows where all the different pieces of Eclipse come from and how it becomes very complicated:
~ From the PDE team, with love.
What sucks about Eclipse?
By Chris Aniszczyk
I’m live blogging the What sucks about Eclipse panel. I’m trying to provide answers to the various questions asked as they come in. Sorry if I don’t get everything 🙂
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support nested projects?
- Some backward compatibility issues…
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support word wrapping?
- There was a Google Summer of Code project out of Eclipse that tried to tackle this enhancement. I’m sure the bug is open to contributions.
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support macro recording?
- Why is it so hard to work with actions?
- Paul Webster has done a lot of good work in this area about the new command infrastructure. He gave a talk at EclipseCon about it.
- Why is Eclipse UI’s look and feel lagging behind?
- Not conclusive what exactly is lagging…
- Why is there no first class Subversion support in Eclipse?
- Subversive and Subclipse are the current options. There is a project proposal currently… there is a newsgroup out there also for people to participate. Apparently, the Eclipse project has excellent turnaround time and the Subversive project proposal has been approved.
- Why is it so hard to find out what new things installed actually do? How do you discover new functionality?
- We need to connect the existing Welcome framework with new features that are installed. Users need to be aware of what goes in. Looks like the frameworks are there, they just need to be connected.
- Why is GEF so hard to work with the existent editor infrastructure?
- Why can’t PDE Build (or Eclipse in general) provide native installers out of box? That is, provide a Mac installer, Windows installer, RPM, etc…
- There is the new provisioning work going on… there is the Eclipse packaging project… and there is the new Maya proposal.
- Why does every project like PDE, Ant, ATF, WTP, etc… have different XML editors?
- Why do editors and views have to be different and so hard to have an XML view (using the existing editor infrastructure)?
- Why are there modal dialogs in Eclipse like the launch configuration?
- How do we make Eclipse so new users aren’t overwhelmed?
- Capabilities are around to help… but no-one uses it…
- Why doesn’t Eclipse have a good free visual editor…
Visualization in the Eclipse SDK
By Chris Aniszczyk
After talking to a few people (while imbibing some beers) and hearing Jeff Norris at the BlueSky BOF complain about how hard it is to visualize dependencies in RCP projects… I realized that in the base Eclipse SDK, we lack a fundamental and easy way for people to create visualizations (think Java2D). I think this is part of the reason we don’t see more visualization in Eclipse.
In PDE, we have an incubator currently setup where we (thanks Ian!) are working on some visualization tools. The technology that we use to make this happen is called Zest. You can think of Zest as a lightweight MVC type wrapper on top of Draw2D (similar to how JFace operates on top of SWT). With Zest, you simply bring your model and work with the familiar constructs of content and label providers. I mean, it’s really easy to come up with a graphical editor (I will post a simple example in a future blog entry).
What do people think? Do we need to strive to push this type of functionality into the SDK so more people will be able to use it without having to download some add-ins? If so, let’s file a bug and discuss it.
Equinox and Adaptor Hooks
By Chris Aniszczyk
The Equinox Adaptor Hook demo went well today. Tom Watson and co., did a very good job explaining Adaptor Hooks and how they can be used for various things like monitoring and transformations within the framework (also how large IBM Eclipse-based products were able to shave around 30% of startup time due to the JXE adaptor). For those would couldn’t make the demo, the wiki entry on adaptor hooks provides a good synopsis of how things work.
Eclipse is about people
By Chris Aniszczyk
Well, the news is in, the Eclipse Community Award winners for 2007 have been announced. Congratulations to all, it was a great year for Eclipse!
I have a confession to make, about four years ago I thought Eclipse was about the source code. I remember grabbing a copy of Eclipse and just being amazed at all the cool things it could do. I spent a lot of time playing with the source, seeing how things were done and tinkering with things. However, it wasn’t until I started to interact with the Eclipse newsgroups that I saw the real side of Eclipse. Eclipse is all about the community, not the source code out there. All of us in the community rely on each other to get questions answered and problems solved (and by doing that, we in turn become part of the Eclipse community).
I just wanted to say thanks to all that have voted and more importantly, thanks to the community. I just view myself as a guy who is simply reciprocating the wonderful help I have received from people like Ed Merks on the newsgroups; Paul Webster, John Arthorne, Kim Horne, Philippe Ombredanne (and many more people!) on IRC.
To all, let’s keep the ball rolling by just helping each other out and taking the time to help new community members (there are many outlets to do this). The greatest strength in Eclipse lies in its community and lets remember, in the end, Eclipse is about people.
PDE Soiree
By Chris Aniszczyk
Wow, I go on a small vacation and Gunnar totally goes Extreme Makeover on PlanetEclipse (good job Gunnar!) While being stuck at the YVR airport, I just wanted to remind people of the PDE BOF that is going on tomorrow night. This is a good chance to meet the committers, praise the tooling, or more importantly, gripe about problems you face in using PDE’s tools. Does the fact that PDE doesn’t support case insensitive manifest headers well light a fire under your behind? Or if you’re coming from the OSGi world, why the heck is the required bundles section on the left side instead of the imports section on the dependencies page? The PDE team is always looking for feedback from our users and here is your chance!