Eclipse 3.6 M5 is now available for download. There are lots of new and exciting features, like the ability to open and file directly from the command line. You can also use the synchronize view to compare patches:
Debug also introduced a few new features (like instance counts):
Check out all the new features in the New and Noteworthy.
Download the milestone:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.6M5-201001291300/index.php
or use p2 to upgrade to it:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.6milestones/
Tags: helios
After more than a year of work we have finally completed the entire OSGi and Equinox book. The text, artwork, index, front matter and now cover are done and will be off to the printer and a bookstore near you in the next few days.
The cover marks a departure from the original series style of Eclipse photos. The publisher and series editorial team felt that that theme had run its course and the wanted a new look. We are pleased to be the first book with the new look. Expect subsequent books in the series to have a similar upper portions with different main images in the lower half.
Note also the use of the EclipseRT logo on the upper right corner.
Books in the series will have either the Eclipse logo or the EclipseRT logo depending on their focus (tooling vs. runtime). The upcoming 2nd edition of the RCP book will be the second in the series to have the new cover style and the EclipseRT logo. We have not decided on the imagery yet though…
Happy reading…
Tags: eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi
I spent part of today trying to debug a Linux specific issue in which wizard pages are not being shown properly. Actually, the content of some wizard pages are not showing up at all (Bug 298805 if you’re interested).
While thinking through the problem on IRC (yes, you should be on IRC), Susan McCourt had a great idea — install the SWT Spy and see what it shows.
The SWT Spy is a small tool that allows you to place your mouse over a widget and get information about that widget, including:
- Layout information
- Bounds
- Siblings
- Parent Chain (back to the shell)
I hacked the tool a bit to add the visibility field. The SPY is available from: http://www.eclipse.org/swt/tools.php. Once installed, you can toggle the spy using CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+”.”.
An oldie but a goodie.
Tags: swt, tips
Just in time for the Holidays, the Eclipse platform team has made Eclipse 3.6 Milestone 4 available.
Feel free to download it:
http://download.eclipse.org/equinox/drops/S-3.6M4-200912101301/index.php
Upgrade to it:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.6milestones
or just browse the New and Noteworthy:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.6M4-200912101301/eclipse-news-M4.html
There’s a whole host of new features such as Virtual Folders
and the ability to execute multiple quick fixes at once:
Enjoy the early Christmas present 
Tags: eclipse, helios
There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Eclipse community is and is not doing. While I have no intention of going anywhere near that conversation, I did want to highlight something that makes me very proud to be part of this great community. This month, the Eclipse community raised over $3,000 for men’s health issues, and that’s awesome!
Of course I’m talking about Movember!
David Green led all Mommitters with $740 raised. Thanks David. A big thank-you also goes out to Kevin Barnes who replied to my tweet on Oct 30th and motivated me to start the Mommitters. This would not have happened without you Kevin. I also want to thank Kim Moir (and Kim Horne for the great suggestion) who helped get our Movember splash screen in the I-Builds.
All the Eclipse Mommitters also deserve a big thank-you for stepping up and growing a stache for charity. You all looked terrific.
But the biggest thanks goes out to all the community members who stepped up with their wallets and donated a few bucks to a great cause. Looking through the list of donations it was quite a diverse group of individuals. As a community there may be things we can improve, but I think we should be very proud of this accomplishment.
Tags: movember
We’ve reached the 20th of Movember and its time for a progress report from this Eclipse Mommitter.
- Shaved in the ’stache earlier in the week
- Kids just could not stop laughing
- Wife would not look at me or kiss me
- After a week there has been some progress.
- The kids have finally stopped laughing (though now “pull the ’stache is the game of the day)
- Wife will kiss me but still can’t really look at me
Here, judge for yourself.
Its a little strange to be out in public with the new look. I spent much of the week on the road for the EclipseRT days in Austin and Toronto. Great events with lots of good people around. I particularly enjoyed that there were ample breaks between sessions and lots of good conversations. And it turns out that the whole Movember thing is a good ice-breaker. Even got a donation out of it! Valentin Baciu, another Mommitter of similar moustache design donated more to the cause. Thanks! The Eclipse Mommitter team is up to $2200 now. Pretty good effort but we could always use more donations.
Tags: movember, syndicate
Lately I have been working on (and committing) a repository analyzer tool for p2. It is meant to help you validate your repository against known problems and common mistakes (missing version numbers, two IUs with the same ID/Version, etc…). After cleaning up the code I finally committed it. Within a few minutes of committing it, Andrew starting pinging me to let me know I introduced a compile error. (Thanks Andrew).
The offending lines where here:
and more precisely:
You see, while this may seem fine to all you Java 1.6 developers out there, p2 is set to run on CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1 and JSE-1.4. I know in the Java SE space, 1.4 is long past end of life, but in the embedded space, it is still very common. (Remember, these embedded devices require much smaller VMs, otherwise we complain that our small devices are two slow /sluggish / expensive, etc…) — and p2 is a provisioning platform that operates just fine on embedded devices.
With Eclipse, you can set your Execution Environment (EE) and point to a variety of JDKs. This allows you to “single source” your code so the same code can run on a server with Java 1.6 installed and a small device with a Foundation VM. However, I don’t have a Foundation VM 
.
Lucky for us, an EE description for several JDKs is available in the Eclipse CVS repository:
Once you checkout the project, you can add this to your list of known JREs
Now I get all the Java tooling (content assist, compile errors, etc…) for the Foundation 1.1 VMs.
Tags: OSGi, pde, tips
I am very pleased to see that the first code arrived in the RAP incubator project. The contribution consists of the very early steps towards a spread sheet component.
It is still in the proof of concept phase. The goal so far was to find out whether a spread sheet that is composed of existing widgets could work with regard to performance and usability. This seems to work out rather well. As a consequence of composing the spread sheet of existing widgets the same code runs on SWT as well.
In case you whish to play around with it or even contribute, the source code can be obtained from CVS and resides in the incubator/spreadsheet module.
Tags: eclipse rap, rap, Single Sourcing, swt
We are 1/2 way through the month of Movember and I thought I would use this opportunity to update the status of my Mo. I have started with the “trucker” look, although this may change as the month progresses.
The Eclipse Momitters are doing well too. We have 12 team members and have raised over $1,500 for men’s health issues (like prostate cancer) — If you have a few minutes and can spare a few dollars, please consider donating to the cause. To help raise awareness, Kim suggested we create a Movember splash screen for this weeks Eclipse integration build.
If you think you can do better, please bring your art work to bug 295192.
Tags: movember
After another 6 weeks of working hard towards the Helios Release, we’re a step closer. RAP M3 for Eclipse 3.6 is out and can be obtained from the RAP project page. Besides another 130 bugfixes and many New and Noteworthy features, here are my personal favorites of this milestone:
Non-shared SWT resources
Finally, we decided to provide constructors and a dispose mechanism for SWT resources like fonts, images, colors and cursors. While we still recommend to use the factory-based approach, this features helps a lot when single-sourcing applications that use the resource constructors in a verbose manner.
Yay, it compiles!
Browser History support
You now have the possibility to interact with the client-side browser history. This allows you to set “bookmarks” (eg. when switching tabs or processing a particular workflow) and the user can jump back and forward. Thanks again to Ralf Zahn from ARS who contributed this feature.
Dispose events on session timeout
We also introduced new Listener support on the Display so you’re now able to listen for Dispose events of the Display which is triggered when the session terminates. This way you don’t need to rely on servlet-specific API but rather use the same mechanism as in SWT to clean up your session. In addition you can queue runnables via Display#disposeExec that are executed once the session dies.
I hope you all enjoy the new milestone and give as feedback as fast as possible, API and feature freeze is approaching 
Tags: eclipse rap, eclipseRT, helios, milestone, new & noteworthy
