Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I just noticed in my mail a new issue of EclipseReview. For you onliners, you can download a copy of the magazine here. There’s a pretty detailed article (by a crazy Canadian ;p) in there about using the static analysis tooling from the TPTP project. There was also a decent article in there about the ’27 Must-Have Eclipse Plug-Ins’ (even though there were references to commercial products)

Just to keep people in the loop, it looks like Eclipse is offering the ability to use Subversion now with projects. They are also offering a migration path, however it will erase all your history. This provides an excellent opportunity for you to forget the past if you wish ;p

Hopefully the Foundation will consider adding Trac support now that SVN support is in place. I really enjoy Trac for small projects.

A thought that crossed my mind today was if EclipseCon 2007 will feature an Open Source Pavillion like it did last year. I enjoyed last year’s pavillion and would like to see it this year again, what do people think?

I think an Open Source Pavillion this year would see an increase in applications due to the adoption of Eclipse (especially RCP). It might also be interesting to include some of the work the Google Summer of Code students accomplished in such a short span. Thoughts?

When you are on vacation (snowboarding for a week), it’s always interesting to think of what changed while you’re gone (then you get upset combing through thousands of emails when you get back ;p). Here is my favorite change so far: Bug 165349. Basically this PDE build enhancement (for 3.3M4) allows one to copy subfolders in an easy fashion, for example…

root.folder.<subfolder> = [absolute:][file:]<path>
root.<config>.folder.<subfolder> = [absolute:][file:]<path>

ie.,
root.folder.foo = …
root.win32.win32.x86.folder.foo/bar = …

This change will be used by PDE to allow people to export JREs along with their products.

After doing reviews of various EclipseCon submissions today, I came across a couple of interesting submissions… the first being Expand your Market with Visual Studio. I thought, cool, I always wanted to goto an Eclipse conference and learn how to expand my market with Visual Studio. Within 5 hours, another talk was submitted, Expand your Market with Eclipse 🙂

I personally don’t mind these types of talks as I think competition is healthy, but they are in the business track which I think is less interesting than having some in depth technical discussion/debate (I’m biased) or panel regarding the technical differences (including limitations) between the two. I think this type of discussion would be healthier and more beneficial for both projects.

Anyone from Microsoft interested?

There’s a fairly common and unspoken rule in the open-source community that when you contribute code to a project or component, you should strive to follow the same standards the component your contributing to follows. I’m horrible at this rule. I was introduced into something along the lines of Hungarian Notation, which I nicknamed Zurichian Notation 😉 On the bright side, I managed to enhance the functionality of JFace Text (with the gracious help of Dani) to support case insensitive WordRule’s. This can be very useful if you have editors for things like SQL.

Some of you may be wondering why I exactly fixed this bug, it is because PDE has a demanding (and sometimes ridiculous ;p) community that wants better editing support. Some of you may not know this, but OSGi headers are case insensitive. This isn’t a scenario that PDE currently supports yet, but with the JFace Text fix, we are hoping to support this in the near future.

Mary Beth Raven, the lead product designer for Hannover (the redesign of Lotus Notes), has posted some new screenshots of the Hannover beta. I’ve been doing some test driving myself lately and it’s just crazy to see Eclipse everywhere (it’s bundles all the way down!). I hope things like Hannover will prove to people that you don’t have to look like Eclipse to be an Eclipse-based application.

Hannover may be the biggest deployment of an RCP application to normal end users, well, besides those mp3 leeching college students using Azureus (yes, I know it’s an SWT-based application only).

Some people say it’s the little things that count. I’ve been working on a feature that makes the life of some RCP developers slightly easier. When you export products, you will be given the option to also choose one of your installed JREs to come along with it. This may be news to some people, but if an RCP application has a JRE in the jre directory (under the root directory), the application will automatically use that JRE (see picture below).

It’ll appear in the next I-build once I work out some of the kinks 🙂

I just came across this and I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the project dashboards so I wanted to share 🙂 It’s interesting to see the list of “Most Hated Bugs” compared with the “Most Wanted Enhancements” 🙂

GEF has a special place in my heart. It was the first piece of Eclipse technology I worked with and I remember the pain vividly. I remember my first task at IBM was to do some fun graphical tooling back in the days of no documentation. I recall asking where VIM was and a few days later I stopped asking (after being laughed at of course ;p) and that was the start of my Eclipse adventure.

I’m not sure how many people have experience with GEF out there, but an idea came across to me today. In my opinion, GEF has been somewhat stagnate lately. And by stagnate, I mean mature (in the nicest way possible). I think GEF meets people’s use cases for the most part, but it’s lacking another layer in my opinion. There is a project called Zest out of Mylar that if I were to phrase it in one simple sentence, a JFace type wrapper for GEF. This would bring new types of viewers and layout algorithms for public consumption. Part of the pain in learning GEF was writing your own viewers and custom layout algorithms.

I of course have an agenda in stating this because PDE has a need for visualization (see picture below)

If people are interested in this type of project (or have use cases for it), I would encourage everyone to comment on this bug. It may be the case that GEF decides to have some type of GEF incubator. All the cool kids currently have incubators or are planning one 😉