The Eclipse Hibachi project was formally announced today.
It looks like they’ll be cooking up some good Ada tooling 🙂
Posts Tagged with “eclipse”
Plug-in Spy, RCP and Eclipse 3.3
By Chris Aniszczyk
I’ve been asked a few questions about the Plug-in Spy (ALT+SHIFT+F1) but haven’t had time to reply, but now I do so here’s my chance.
Does the Plug-in Spy work in RCP?
Yes, but you’ll miss out on the fancy hyperlinking… instead all classes are resolved to their fully qualified name. Outside the normal RCP set of dependencies, the spy depends on org.eclipse.ui.forms which is fairly minimal and is probably in your RCP application already. Here’s a quick screenshot of the famous RCP Mail example from PDE with two extra dependencies added (org.eclipse.ui.forms and org.eclipse.pde.runtime which contains the spy):
Does the Plug-in Spy work in Eclipse 3.3?
It should, it doesn’t depend on anything from the 3.4 code base. I’d just build your own copy of the spy from HEAD and export it using the PDE wizards.
Does the Plug-in Spy work in Eclipse 3.2?
No, it takes advantage of some things found in the Platform Command Framework which made its debut in the 3.3 version of Eclipse. In theory the spy could work in 3.2, but it would require a rewrite and that’s something I’m not interested or have time for right now. There are bigger fish to fry in PDE at the moment to make plug-in development truly a first-class experience.
Happy spying!
Contributors and PDE 3.4M3
By Chris Aniszczyk
Eclipse 3.4M3 is coming out soon and with that, I thought I’d offer everyone a sneak peek at what’s going on from the PDE side of things. However, before I do that, I’d like to mention that for the first time, PDE had more bugs fixed from contributors than committers. So I first like to thank the following people for their contributions this milestone:
- Adam Archer
- Ian Bull
- Joern Dinkla
- Kevin Doyle
- Gary Duprex
- Les Jones
- Danial Nachev
- Ketan Padegaonkar
- Jacek Pospychala
- Remy Suen
- Curtis Windatt
- Darin Wright
In terms of what was done for this milestone, let me show one of my favorite ones:
It’s now possible to refactor extension points and have it automatically update referencing extensions found in the workspace. This was a bit painful before if you had to do it by hand and happened quite frequently to me because I’d define an extension point like thing and forgot to pluralize it into things.
For the rest, you’ll have to wait until Friday 🙂
XML Tools Component
By Chris Aniszczyk
Just to keep people in the loop, the Webtools project is going to be incubating a new XML Development Tools component. The goal of this new component is turn Eclipse into a first-class XML development tool. It will include contributions from the popular EclipseXSLT and X-Assist projects. From my perspective, it’s really exciting to see Eclipse community members coming together to make the XML development space a better place in Eclipse.
Disabling Bundles
By Chris Aniszczyk
The PDE and Equinox Framework teams have been busy graduating a concept of enable and disable for the runtime.
What does this mean? Well, bundles can essentially be disabled and prevented from starting due to some reasoning. This concept is very useful to the security work that is going on in the Equinox incubator. To help test this concept, the OSGi console was enhanced to support some new commands (enable/disable):
I also decided to polish up the Plug-in Registry view in PDE to enable power users to do some advanced bundle-related operations:
As a power user, don’t be a stupid power user and stop/disable some important bundles in your runtime instance 🙂
On a side note, if you want to help PDE improve the Plug-in Registry view even more, I filed an enhancement regarding exposing a Diagnose action similar to what is available in the OSGi console.
Greatbugs
By Chris Aniszczyk
Kim Horne reminded me today about greatbugs. I don’t know if Eclipse contributors know this, but it brings us committers such joy when a bug comes with detailed steps to reproduce, a patch and a test case. It’s a trifecta of bug squashing goodness.
It saves committers a ton of time if there is an easy way to reproduce the problem and a solution attached. In PDE, we recently filed a bug to do some refactoring around project operations and in the back of our minds thought that this type of stuff would never get addressed. Lo and behold, Les Jones contributed an excellent patch and test case to boot for the enhancement. Les will make his way to the PDE Hall of Fame soon 🙂
On a side note, Ian Bull (PDE Incubator committer) squeezed in an enhancement for 3.4M3 today. It will now be easier to work with your launch configurations when dealing with thousands of bundles. By the way, someone should hire Ian, I hear he’s finishing his PhD soon and I will be personally devastated if he doesn’t find a good job.
Eclipse October BugDay
By Chris Aniszczyk
Just a friendly reminder that the Eclipse October BugDay is coming up this Friday. We already have a few awesome participants, but it would be nice to have some more. If you’re interested in helping PDE out this time around, we recently enhanced the error log view by partitioning out log statements by session:
Cool huh? It would even be cooler if the current session was highlighted.
If bolding text isn’t your thing, here are some other bugs from PDE:
Powered by Pulse?
By Chris Aniszczyk
It looks like we may have a new contender in the ring for Eclipse Distros… however, I think it may be a bit more than that given what is stated in the article. An interesting quote:
Other features of the PoweredByPulse service include: a small initial installation footprint of 2MB; fast installations available through optimized use of mirrors and simultaneous downloading of components; rich user experience in Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform)-based client for a positive experience and ease of use; PoweredByPulse branding, along with maintaining product branding through use of ‘splash fades;’ desktop integration with customizable program group and desktop icons to enable fast profile launches; and cross-platform capability with Windows and Linux in November and Macintosh to follow.
It’s been a dream of mine to see a tiny initial Eclipse download that would sort of serve as an update manager. It would be able to browse a central repository of managed update information very quickly and allow users to download what they want. On top of that, it would allow users to manage flavors of Eclipse to launch based on a bundle pool. For example, if I had “WebTools”, “DataTools”, “PHPTools” and “C++Tools” installed, being able to easily launch an Eclipse with say only C++ tooling enabled and another “profile” for all my web-related development would be awesome. I usually find myself doing this manually with a ton of Eclipse installs and duplicated plug-ins 🙂
If Genuitec has indeed done this, then kudos to them, it’s much sooner than I’d envisioned it happening. I guess we will have to wait and see.