Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I don’t have much to say today, so I decided to post some screenshots (thank you Gorkem for the S60 love) from the eRCP project that were recently taken for an eRCP article (that will be appearing in the next edition of EclipseReview magazine).

Here is your typical “Hello, eRCP” screenshot on a Windows Mobile 2005 device:

Here is a screenshot of some SWT labels and text boxes running on a Nokia S60 (looks sexier than the WM2005 imho):

Ah, the special love I have for the SWT Browser widget (on a Nokia S60):

I swear I’ve seen this component somewhere before… (eUpdate on a WM2005 device):

I had a long weekend doing a marketing plan (STP!) for school but I had some time to dabble with this new FilteredTree object (I got excited when I started to notice this object being adopted in places like debug). I decided to give a shot and think where filtered tree’s could be useful in the viewpoint of PDE. I saw quite a few applications (Wassim disagrees with me, like on some things) but it turns out we have an affinity for TableViewer’s in PDE and not too many tree’s. However, we do have one location where a filtered tree would be great (look for it in the next I build):

Filtered trees are awesome (thank you Platform UI), but there are a couple of issues that need to be solved. One of the big ones seems performance (try our new filtered extensions using JDT UI’s gargantuan plugin.xml). The other stems in extensibility (wouldn’t it be nice to have a FilteredViewer so you can use other types of viewers, not only trees?). If these two issues were tackled, we would have more adopters of the filtered tree (and other variants as they come into existance)

There has been quite a bit of moving lately in the Eclipse project space. I’ve noticed that the eRCP project has moved its newsgroups to fall under the DSDP project. Richard Gronback has also notified that “we are now part of the new top-level Eclipse Modeling Project, this newsgroup will migrate from eclipse.technology.gmf to eclipse.modeling.gmf” I wonder when the other “modeling” projects will move (ie., EMF).

Gunnar and I have an article out on Java Developer’s Journal that has quotes from the various committers of the Callisto release. It’s interesting to see the mix of companies in the quotes (I tried my best not to get all IBMr’s, but you guys never return my phone calls ;p)

Also, there’s a great article (that Wayne needs to publish, *cough cough*) by Christian Damus (master of all things EMFT) that focuses on EMFT/OCL.

Remember those old Choose your Adventure books? Well, I want to take the same approach for a talk/class I’m going to give at the upcoming EclipseWorld conference: 507. Eclipse on Cell Phones!? An Introduction to the Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP).

For about half the talk/class, there will be a lot of speaking regarding the history of eRCP and many other joyous things about eRCP. The last half, will be more like a lab where we work on some cool exercises. The last half is where I leave it up to the community to define (hence, choose your own adventure). I had a few ideas regarding showing how you would port a typical application to work on eRCP (I was going to use Wayne’s oh-so famous Sudoku example). Another idea was to go through the basics of developing your first eSWT, eWorkbench and eUpdate-able applications.

So, any ideas what people would like to see? I have about a month to put things together 😉

ECF (I’m phoenix’ng the website as we speak, sorry) had some updates recently (mostly for the summer of code folk) so I’m posting them here to see if people will offer feedback to these great guys:

ECF BitTorrent Provider (bug #144133)

The BitTorrent stuff is working pretty good… I’ve been toying with some of the sample UIs. It is also dual-licensed (MIT/EPL).

JXTA Provider

Shared Code Plugin (Howto)

The shared code stuff is pretty cool… the concept is really interesting and I think it just goes to show that collaborative technology will be important as Eclipse evolves over time.

After having the pleasure of working on some of Eclipse’s update internals (and realizing I’m more of a scruff) today, I thought to myself, what type of feature am I? Happy? Ambiguous? Unhappy?

I think I’ll go with the unhappy one today.

On a serious note, I think that the Eclipse update story needs to be seriously looked at in the 3.3 time frame (plan item would be nice) because of limitations (ie., not using Bundle.update()). Thoughts? Gripes?

Since I’m convinced that only committers (well, a majority being committers) read the mailing lists, I decided I would post this information here. The Platform UA page has been updated with Phoenix magic and has a new proposal for people to gawk at: Remote Help. Signup on UA’s mailing list if you want to offer feedback on the proposal.

Also, stay tuned for the Eclipse Import/Export improvements series of posts by Wassim and I (we will rock the casbah).

I just got back from South Padre for my 4th of July fesitivies (note: don’t fall asleep on the beach with your shades on, I ended up with a raccoon tan). When I got back, I decided to boot Eclipse and see how the SOC BitTorrent project was coming along. I’ve been helping the student (Remy Suen) on the project for awhile, however, he has been fairly autonomous and hasn’t had to suffer from my mentoring too much 😉 I was delighted to see the progress (there’s a few kinks) so I decided to download Eclipse 3.2 torrent using a sample UI included in Remy’s work.

Not too shabby eh ;)? I think we’re getting really close to a MIT/EPL’d BitTorrent implementation for all. Remy has done a fantastic job and I encourage people to mess with things and provide some feedback.

While sifting through the typical snail-mail, I was filled with joy to come across a brand new issue of EclipseReview.

I learn new things everytime I pick up this magazine… (personally, I’ve been clamoring for a magazine devoted to Eclipse that was in English) there was an article about the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) which was enlightening as all I heard about it before was that Rational donated a zillion lines of code to this project. In short, EPF is a framework and set of tools that help define and manage software development methods. From the screenshots in the magazine, EPF looks fairly snazzy and polished (Ponch approves).

There’s also an article by our own Martin Perez about RCP.

Please check out the magazine and let Alan & George know that they are doing a good thing 🙂

Almost a year ago, there was an announcement regarding Aperi…

Aperi will be modeled after the Eclipse consortium set up by IBM in conjunction with other vendors to handle open-source projects to create development tools and frameworks for building software. Eclipse was spun out from IBM in early 2004 to become an independent, nonprofit organization called the Eclipse Foundation.

When I was first saw this announcement, I thought it was silly to setup another consortium modeled like Eclipse, instead of joining Eclipse. Well, not to my surprise, anyone see the new Aperi project proposal :)? I think the main issue was that a lot of the initial donated code was full of Swing love and will need to be eventually ported to Eclipse love. Looking at the proposal, it seems they are shifting to RCP…

…The evolution of the GUI to a full implementation of the Eclipse RCP will likely center on the Aperi topology viewer and the BIRT reporting engine.

Eclipse, +1
organization modeled after Eclipse consortium, 0