If anybody is going to be in Dublin next Thursday (Sept 9th), I’ll be talking about OSGi, Software Modularity and Single Sourcing. Details of the event can be found here. If anybody is going to be in the area, let me know. I’d love to catch up with some Eclipse folks over a few frosty beverages.
I know Eclipse ‘Help’ is not a very exciting topic, but today I found myself working with a little known secret of Help. Most people know that you can setup context sensitive help (Press F1 and bring up help for the specific workbench part under focus). However, did you now you do the opposite? That is, activate code in your RCP application from a link in Help?
Here’s the use case: Say you have created a chat client built on the Eclipse RCP Platform. Like any good software engineer, you’ve created extensive help content. In addition to Instructions, you want to provide links that actually open the dialogs, or perform the actions. Active Help is the solution.
In this example, I’ve added a link that opens the “Add Contact” dialog, directly from the “Adding a Contact” Help page.
Doing this is extremely simple too. On the Java side, you simply need to implement the ILiveHelpAction. Then, on the help side you simply add the following JavaScript to your help contents:
<a href='javascript:liveAction( "org.eclipsercp.hyperbola", "org.eclipsercp.hyperbola.ActiveHelpOpenDialogAction", "")'>Click here for a Message.</a>
The only thing to keep in mind is that the Action is not executed on the UI thread, so you may need to synchronize this yourself.
Last week Wim Jongman bloged about the Nebula Oscilloscope widget. It’s just an awesome widget for monitoring activity. See Wim’s post to form an opinion yourself.
So, for me as a RAP developer, the first question I always ask myself when seeing such a cool thing is: “Will it run on RAP?”. I followed the steps Wim described to get the Oscilloscope running, changed the target to RAP, commented out one line of code and started the application. You can see the result in the screencast below.
I think the result is just awesome. It runs very smooth with almost no lags. For all of you who don’t know it yet, this is possible because we implemented the GC and published it with RAP 1.3. The updates from the server are realized via the UICallback mechanism of RAP. I think this video shows that, in the meantime, RAP became a very sophisticated technology. We are all looking forward to seeing a lot more cool things like this working with RAP.
After the Helios Release, we are one step closer to Indigo. RAP 1.4 M1 is now available. From the new features, here are my personal top three:
Here are three recent developments from Eclipse Riena, that you may otherwise have missed:
• Version 3.0 announced – we have updated the development plan, skipping the 2.1 release and shooting straight for a 3.0 release next June (Eclipse Indigo). While we strive to keep the bulk of the APIs unchanged, this move will grant us the flexibility to carefully introduce changes needed to support Eclipse RAP.
You can read the full announcement here.
• Riena goes to the Web – We are excited about having all of Riena run on Eclipse RAP and are stepping up the effort.
In the last two weeks we have ported and committed the Riena Navigation to RAP. Thanks to recent improvements in RAP this was a breeze! We also have an automated build for this second platform. Lastly, we have worked to eliminate all compile errors when building against RAP. This should make further development more straightforward.
If you want to follow the effort add yourself on Bug 302893 and read the ‘Riena on RAP‘ page on the wiki.
• Riena at Eclipse Summit Europe - Riena committers are participating at the ESE, November 2 – 4 in Ludwigsburg. We have proposed following talks:
If you are interested in any of these topics: please follow the link and leave a short comment. This will help the organizers decide which talks to approve. Thanks!
Here are the slides from my “Eclipse RAP – What’s new in Helios?“ talk, which I gave at the Bay Area Demo Camp in June. They capture the most interesting novelties of the RAP 1.3 release. You can find even more details in the full release notes.
I want to thank Oracle and AvantSoft for hosting and organizing the event.
If you are interested in future Eclipse events in the Bay Area, please take a moment to join the Bay Area Eclipse User Group on Meetup.com
A few weeks ago I presented you my GSoC 2010 project. The idea was to make Equinox/RAP WAR deployment easier. And yes, it was a real pain to create .war files for an Equinox/RAP application. About 215 deployment related threads on the RAP newsgroup speak for themselves. But the pain is over now, and I think I can say, “Mission accomplished”.
I want to introduce you to a new concept called WAR Products. They are similar to Eclipse Products but much more lightweight. All you have to do to export a RAP application is to create a .warproduct based on a working launch configuration and press ‘export’. The exported .war file is ready to deploy. There is a function included that validates your .war file content before you’ve exported it. If you don’t believe me, watch the screencast below and see for yourself.
You can use the tooling right now, but please keep in mind that we are still polishing. The final goal is to contribute it back to PDE, but there are still a few things to do before we make the contribution. One of those items is to get your initial feedback so when you use the WAR Products tooling, please be sure submit your feature requests or file bugs and help us to continue to improve the tooling.
Here is what you need to do to use the WAR Products tooling:
Again, comments, bugs and feature requests are appreciated!
At this point I want to thank some people. First of all, Rüdiger Herrmann for great mentoring and the whole RAP team for all the nice evenings in the beer garden. Not to forget Simon Kaegi, Scott Lewis and Chris Aniszczyk and the rest of the Equinox and PDE teams for tuning up the Product concept. Your changes made things much easier.
And, I hope that you will find WAR deployment and creating WAR Products not just easier, but completely pain free!
What do the following people have in common:
They were the original 8 feeds on PlanetEclipse. If you are interested in some of the first posts checkout this link. Or, you can browse through time here.
For those of you that don’t know, planeteclipse is open to committers, contributors, or anybody with a passion for Eclipse. If you have something to say, feel free to request that your feed be added (checkout the guidelines first).
Some of you might remember the Mars challenge back at the last EclipseCon? – well; it’s back.
Now that the Eclipse 4.0 SDK released, we ‘d like to introduce to you the revival of this challenge – on RAP.
We re-implemented the e4 Mars Rover client, single sourced it using RAP and are now presenting the RAP Rover Challenge. We use our own server now and since we don’t have the original EclipseCon rover and arena we simply simulate those on client side using the data we get from the server. However old clients should be able to adopt to the new server using this URL: http://rap.eclipsesource.com:8081/server/ – with the slight difference that there is no picture sent by the server.
For those of you who have not heard of it, here’s how you use it:
You should simply visit the challenge site (or click on the screen shot below) and sign up for control. When you gain control, hit the targets and score points. Check out after if you were able to beat the current high score.
If you are interested in the e4 client code you can find that here.
Have fun – we hope you’ll enjoy our e4 + RAP showcase.
The original rover at the EclipseCon
The e4 mars rover client on the web
On September 8th, the Eclipse Testing Day takes place in Darmstadt. I have the honor of giving the opening talk about what I call finding the scope for a test.
A lot of programmers seem to have difficulties with finding the right level for testing existing or new functionality. In general, they include too many classes and a too broadly defined system environment in test dependencies. This leads to trouble with reproducibility and stability.
In my talk, I’ll focus on RCP developers and share a few patterns and best practices that have been helpful in our team for finding the right level for writing a test.
Hope to see you in Darmstadt.
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