In the spirit of the “PDE is so smart” plan item for 3.3, Brian Bauman of PDE fame has added a nifty hook so that when you refactor a project name that has the same symbolic name as the plug-in/bundle it contains, it will update the symbolic name in the manifest to the new one. Brian claimed he was aided by the help of the easy button…
PDE and Refactoring
By Chris Aniszczyk
Get to know Eclipse User Assistance
By Chris Aniszczyk
Before I leave for the snowy mountains of British Columbia, I figure I would drop a mention of a new article (oh my, it’s my 10th one at dW!) I have written about Eclipse User Assistance (UA). It’s an introductory article aimed to pique people’s interest in Eclipse UA. I think UA is one of the things people take for granted in Eclipse and should aim to use more of the facilities available. For example, I think if more projects aimed to use cheatsheets, they could help their users with the learning curve associated with their project. In fact, the PDE and eRCP tutorials at EclipseCon will be exclusively using cheatsheets to help guide tutorial participants.
Also, thanks to Dejan Glozic and his team for valuable comments on the article.
Useful GEF Links
By Chris Aniszczyk
While helping a person on IRC on some GEF-related questions, I came across a few blog posts that do a pretty good job on explaining GEF. So much so that I was impressed and therefore I am posting this here now for future reference:
– Building a GEF-based Eclipse editor – part 0
– Building a GEF-based Eclipse editor – part 1
– Building a GEF-based Eclipse editor – part 2
– Building a GEF-based Eclipse editor – part 3
Eclipse 3.3 Project Plan Updated
By Chris Aniszczyk
Just to keep people in the know in case they don’t subscribe to every mailing list, the Eclipse 3.3 project plan has been updated and posted.
Opening editors on files outside your workspace
By Chris Aniszczyk
The PDE team (as in mostly Brian Bauman) was recently messing around with our precious log viewer. Part of this quest involved dealing with opening files outside your workspace (within Eclipse). If one remembers, there’s an excellent FAQ entry (a bit of a hack) on this topic, however, it is a bit dated. Things have improved with the advent of EFS. To do something similar now, simply do this…
// super cool way to open files outside your workspace
EFS.getLocalFileSystem().getStore(yourPath);
IDE.openEditorOnFileStore(page, fileStore);
Jack Bauer and PDE
By Chris Aniszczyk
I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who voted in the Eclipse Community Awards, I appreciate the support. I haven’t been able to blog lately due to being in shock from the last episode of 24, but I feel I need to inform people of a subtle, yet important change (oops) in PDE. The vmargs of your current host platform will now be respected in your self-hosted (launch) platform. Technically this means that you get your vmargs pre-pended to your self-hosted configuration’s vmargs. This helps Mac people and also people who don’t like seeing out of memory errors 😉
Sweatin’ to the Oldies :)
By Chris Aniszczyk
I had this on my TODO list for awhile, but I’m finally catching up. During my “Annual Call for Faces“, one of the Eclipse Foundation staff members decided to be a comedian and post a picture of his face:
I took the back of his head as a sign that I could have a face of my choosing for his planet presence:
🙂
By the way, the Eclipse Community Awards are coming to a close and it would be great if everyone threw in their vote, there’s a lot of quality candidates this year!
Eclipse and Google’s Summer of Code
By Chris Aniszczyk
It looks like Google’s Summer of Code program is back. Eclipse participated last year with some great results and will do it again this year. There is currently a wiki entry for people to post possible ideas that students can work on for projects.
I encourage various Eclipse projects to post ideas that a) would be cool to work on for students and b) useful to the Eclipse project so it can possibly be incorporated (this has the added benefit of students possibly becoming active contributors or committers). The ECF and Mylar projects last year had some good results out of the Eclipse Summer of Code projects, so please consider coming up with good ideas and mentoring some awesome students. This is a good exercise in community building 😉
There is also an EclipseCon panel this year that will discuss some of the projects that happened last year, and what worked and what didn’t.
A Day of Plug-in Development
By Chris Aniszczyk
After joining the circle of Eclipse committers who have won competitions, I’d like to make sure everyone is aware that the PDE team is “so filled with the joy of EclipseCon coming up that we cannot contain it.” At EclipseCon, we have declared “PDE Monday” that starts with our wonderful tutorial, “Fundamentals of Eclipse and RCP Development.” We have a lot of new content this year for the tutorial so you should definitely make time if you’re new to Eclipse plug-in development. There will be four committers capable of answering your questions this year and giving you the attention you deserve by attending our tutorial 😉
After the tutorial, we are hosting a soiree (BOF) in the evening which will be followed by drinks 😉
Invasion of the Body Text Snatchers
By Chris Aniszczyk
One small change that wasn’t really announced recently in PDE was in relation to how the dreaded “body text” is handled. If you had an extension that had something like a description attribute, it would be impossible to find how to modify that attribute. Well, things have changed 🙂
