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.
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:
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).
Two days ago was the Helios DemoCamp in Darmstadt at Deutsche Telekom. I think it was a very successful evening with a whole bunch of good talks. Two of them are very noteworthy.
The first one was presented by Marcel Bruch. He talked about the Eclipse Code Recommenders project which he’s working on at TU Darmstadt. The basic idea behind this project is to provide a way to recommend code. He used the analogy of the Amazon online store. When you buy a book you always get a recommendation along the lines of, “People who bought this book also found this one interesting…”. The Code Recommenders does exactly the same just with code. Watch the great screencast the Code Recommenders Team provides if you don’t want to take my word for it.
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Another especially noteworthy demo for me was presented by Stefan Lay. He demo’d the Eclipse Git Team provider called EGit. In addition to the tooling he presented Gerrit. Gerrit is an automated review tool for Git. The scenario he presented was to push some changes to a remote repository. The changes were caught by gerrit to be reviewed. With those changes however, an automated build failed and gerrit sent an automated message that the changes couldn’t be applied because they broke the build. I think this will make the workflow much easier for code review and keeping the repository stable. The EGit project already uses Gerrit for their productive work.
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To put it all in a nutshell it was a very cool DemoCamp with 120 attendees and nice buffet afterwards. At this point I want to thank Ralph Müller and the Foundation who organized a spontanous Eclipse Stammtisch after the DemoCamp. It was great to talk to all the guys individually. The bad thing about this is that the evening went by too fast. But there also a good thing. Most of those people will also attend the Eclipse Summit Europe in November and we can meet again.
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Did you ever wanted to know how features find their way into Eclipse and became a part of a huge release like Eclipse Helios? What role do committers play? What is the part of the community? How do different projects collaborate with each other?
For all of you Benjamin Muskalla and I will give the answer on the Eclipse Helios DemoCamp in Darmstadt on July the 14th. If you are around feel free to step by.
As part of the new Eclipse Helios, the Rich Ajax Platform project released version 1.3. If you’d like to know what is new in RAP 1.3, here’s a short screencast.
You can find a more detailed version on the RAP 1.3 New and Noteworthy page.
Thanks to the community for all the hard work that made this great release possible.
Of course, we are currently making plans for RAP 1.4, which will be part of Indigo. Therefore, we started a discussion on the plan items on our newsgroup. We’re looking forward to another great year with Indigo.
Two weeks ago I asked you to think about high quality software that has been consistently delivered on-time. Think about software that is used by millions of people world-wide, built by hundreds of developers, free to use and open to everybody and anybody. Think about software that spans domains, runs on the smallest of devices and powers the worlds largest enterprises.
Any ideas? Yes I’m talking about Eclipse, and the next release — Helios — has arrived. (For an an ultra fast download try our Amazon Cloudfront mirrors). While everyone seems to enjoy kicking off new software projects, specifying requirements and designing the perfect system, only to have it fizzle out — Eclipse is Different. Eclipse Delivers.
For the past 2 weeks I’ve been counting down the Top 10 Features of Helios that I’m most excited about:
10. Resource Improvements
9. Feature based configurations
8. Improvements to API Tools
7. Java IDE Improvements
6. Target Platform Improvements
5. p2 API and the b3 Aggregator
4. MarketPlace Client
3. EMF, Riena and RAP integration
2. Git Support at Eclipse
And my number 1 feature of the Helios release is: Xtext, Version 1.0.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Xtext, Xtext is a programming language framework. Xtext bridges the gap between grammars, models and programming language tool support. Using Xtext you can create a powerful environment for your own DSL (domain specific language) or full fledged general purpose programming language.
There are a number of important features that make this such a powerful toolkit, including generated editors that support code folding:
styled content providers:
quick fix support:
quick outline view, and more:
There is also a number of tools to help you create Xtext grammars such as Grammar Content Assist:
Xtext also supports project builders and can even derive a grammar from an Ecore model.
I’ve been following Xtext for close to 4 years now (from its origins at openArchitectureWare and through the Textual Model Framework proposal), and it’s great to see this excellent tool declare its 1.0 release. Xtext also received much deserved praise for its outstanding website, large collection of getting started material and they even won the Eclipse Community Award for most Innovative Eclipse Project at EclipseCon this year.
Great work Michael Clay, Sven Efftinge, Moritz Eysholdt, Dennis Huebner, Jan Koehnlein, Sebastian Zarnekow, Heiko Behrens, Peter Friese and Knut Wannheden.
Throughout this series I’ve tried to cover a variety of different Eclipse projects, but this list is far from complete. Please feel free to leave a comment with your favourite Eclipse Helios feature. Or better yet, why not write an article about it?
Did you ever want to know what the Rich Ajax Platform is without spending too much time on it? For all of those we did a screencast that shows what RAP is in about a minute.
You’ll also find the video on the RAP project page.
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