Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

On the first day of Callisto,
my Eclipse committers gave to me
a Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) for free.

As part of the Callisto release, I’ve agreed to write an article with Gunnar about the Callisto release so I figured I would start featuring each Callisto project in blog posts to help me finish the article. For each project, I went out and spoke with project committers to get their perspective. Let’s start with GMF:

GMF brings to Callisto and a more efficient means for Eclipse developers to create graphical editors based on EMF and GEF. Based on model-driven development techniques, GMF leverages a series of models to generate editors targeting the feature-rich GMF diagramming runtime, which can also be used in the absence of the generative framework for the creation of high quality editors. Follow the GMF Tutorial cheat sheet and online tutorial to get started.

— Richard Gronback, GMF Committer, Borland Corporation

Look for other posts in the future if I’m not lazy about it 😉

Sun promises to open-source Java

Apparently, this is the big news out of JavaOne today (someone drink a Guinness for me at the Thirsty Bear).

[Sun has] called upon developers and members of the Java Community Process for feedback on the best way to open source Java. He didn’t provide say when he expects open source Java to be available.

This is interesting to hear from my point of view because Sun has recently been working with Linux distros to ease the distribution of Java. For example, in Gentoo, we use to have a fetch restriction on Sun’s jdk/jre because of their license (this means that the user had to goto Sun’s website and download the Java compressed file after clicking 5 or so things. They also had to sell their soul). Recently, a Sun representative has worked with us (Gentoo) to remove this restriction to make it a bit easier for the end user. So at least props to Sun in this regard 🙂

I’ve been chatting with colleagues lately about what RCP is and what is possible with RCP. One of the comments made was that “do all RCP applications have that Eclipse look?” The answer is no (although I feel like every application needs those swooshy CTabFolder‘s). Some people may not know this, but Eclipse has a presentations API. You can do crazy stuff like theme Eclipse to look like Visual Studio.

What I want to do with this blog post is to start by posting a screenshot of an RCP application that doesn’t “look like Eclipse.” I encourage other PlanetEclipse’rs to follow suit by posting a favourite RCP application of theirs. My application is Lotus’ new Sametime client. Doesn’t look too shabby eh ;)?

After doing some wonderful accounting work tonight, I came across this gem of an article. Here are some interesting quotes:

As far as the possibility of Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling, Gosling would not support this. Sun and Microsoft remain perhaps the only two major technology vendors who are not part of Eclipse

That still sounds good for Eclipse 😉

The Eclipse endorsement of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) destroyed that organization’s interoperability story, according to Gosling. “It’s a toolkit based on the Windows API and getting it to run on other platforms is problematic,” he said.

I’m sure Steve Northover is lovin’ it. Last time I checked, SWT worked just fine on my windows box, linux box (GTK), solaris box (Motif), cell phone (Nokia 7500) and PDA (PocketPC). Those crazy Mac’s are expensive so I don’t have one but I heard SWT works on there too 😉

An Eclipse spokesman disagreed with Gosling’s assertions about Eclipse and SWT.

” I don’t believe James really understands how Eclipse works,” said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse marketing director. The Eclipse platform works well on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and Windows, and the SWT API is dependent on the deployment platform, he said.

“The strength of SWT is that it actually uses the native APIs of the platform,” Skerrett said.

Eclipse also is not a step down from NetBeans, Skerrett said. “I think Eclipse is a very popular, well-used, full-functioned IDE that has the dominant market share in the Java space,” he said.

Ian doing his PR like usual. I could feel him slapping his forehead when he heard that SWT quote 😉

Asked about scripting languages such as PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)taking the spotlight from Java, Gosling stressed coexistence.

“Many of the people who build PHP and Ruby applications actually end up using Java,” Gosling said.

I think I delcare shenanigans on this statement unless someone can prove it otherwise.

I’m one of those guys who likes to learn new things here and there. This week, it was code folding. So, over the past few days I’ve been tackling PDE‘s editors. Personally, I’m a folding ninja and appreciate the fun folding can bring when you’re looking at code. I’ve managed to get things working well with the gracious help of Wassim. Here’s what it looks like:

It should eventually make its way into the build for 3.3

Off to the next thing to learn 🙂

Since I read Eclipse’s newsgroups religiously… I came across this TPTP event which most people may not know about:

What: Eclipse TPTP Java Profiler Summit
When: June 14-16, 2006
Where: Portland, Oregon
Who Should Attend: Tool builders and Consumers (current or potential future adopters)

Eclipse TPTP Java Profiler Project will hold a technology summit during June 14-16, 2006 in Portland, Oregon. It will be a face-to-face only event and will be attended by committers and developers working on Java profiler and run-time analysis tools. It will be a good opportunity to participate in the various exciting and new capabilities we are developing (see below for list of these), learn internals and resources available for adopters or extenders, and getting involved.

So, after Wayne (maybe I should mention Swing so I get more hits also) emailed me a few days ago about the bootcamp for comments, I have given it some thought on how I would present the projects in Callisto. I have this thing where I like to show how projects use each other (a little cross-pollination). I would breakup the bootcamp into three parts. The first part would be with what I call, the “core” projects: Platform (JDT, PDE…) and CDT. It would be nice to show the diversity of the Eclipse platform by demonstrating that you can work with Java as well with C/C++ (language agnostic). Maybe Doug can import the Mozilla code as part of the CDT module 🙂

The next part for me would be to show off GEF, EMF and GMF (in that order). I’ll refer to these as the “core frameworks.” I would start with a simple shapes example in GEF. After people had a taste of GEF, I would bring out EMF and whip out a simple shapes model. To top it off, I would demo GMF by taking the model created in the EMF module and use GMF to generate a graphical editor (so we can come full-circle). The important thing to note here is that GMF takes advantage of both GEF and EMF.

To finish our Callisto adventure, we could dabble with VEP, DTP, WTP, BIRT, TPTP (in that order). Start out with VEP, showing off some eye-candy (mention that it uses EMF for its core models). DTP would be demo’d, I’d create a database using Derby, do some queries on it… The next step would be to create a web app using WTP that takes advantage of the database created using DTP. Then BIRT would be next to show off some of Eclipse’s reporting capabilities using the aforementioned database. (mention the usage of EMF/GEF by BIRT). Finally, TPTP would be demo’d by profiling a java application and then generating some interesting reports (mention the BIRT integration in TPTP, TPTP also uses EMF for its core models).

So, those are my thoughts… comments :o?

I want to commend the Eclipse community for getting involved with Google’s Summer of Code. There are a couple of interesting projects listed:
* Cross platform Eclipse SWT embedded Firefox browser widget
* Mylar and ECF integration, enabling task contexts to be shared synchronously between developers

Now that I’m a student, maybe I can swing towards one of these projects ;p

On a side note, I was reading an interesting tutorial regarding creating games in Eclipse. I believe Doug Schaefer mentioned the notion of Eclipse + Gaming before. I believe there’s a lot of unexplored territory in this field and I’d be curious to hear what people think about it (personally, I just want to have an Eclipse keybinding that brings up invaders or that crazy BASIC game with the gorillas)

I’ve been a bit busy starting a business degree lately (I have to be careful I don’t end up like Donald while I diversify my portfolio;p) but came across some interesting ECF news. One of the ECF committers (Ken Gilmer) has been working on shared editing support (recently updated to work with Java files) in Eclipse using ECF and has put up some basic documentation on how to get it working. If this type of stuff tickles your fancy, the ECF team would appreciate any help in moving this effort along 🙂

On a side note, I want to thank Dejan Glozic for his great work on Eclipse Forms as I’ve enjoyed it the past couple of days.

In recent days, I’ve had a few people come up to me and ask me if there were any examples of shared whiteboarding within ECF. Well, for EclipseCon 2006, Scot Lewis and I (along with the help of the community) created a stupid-simple whiteboard sharing app using ECF APIs. Thanks to the wonderful community, we have some documentation now on how to run this example.