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.

Tags: tips

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.

Tags: helios, nebula, rap, swt

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:

1. We have a new implementation of the SWT Tree widget which is faster, more flexible, and provides many new features.
   
2. In order to support new application servers that already ship with Servlet API (javax.servlet.*) 3.0, RAP is now able to leverage the new Servlet specification. Deploying RAP on application servers like Tomcat 7 or Glassfish 3 is now possible.
3. Since RAP 1.3 you can easily use IApplications instead of IEntryPoints. With this milestone the RAP launcher supports choosing and launching IApplications.
   

• Check out the complete New and Noteworthy for M1.
• Get RAP 1.4 M1 from the RAP download site

Tags: eclipse, indigo, new and noteworthy, rap

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:

• Riena on RAP (Running Riena in the Web)
• Riena on e4 aka “RCP 2.0″
• SWT on Qt
• Tutorial: dynamic UI – from domain model to RCP app (Riena+Modelling+RedView)

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!

Tags: eclipse summit, events, rap, riena, talks

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

Tags: democamp, events, rap, slides, talks

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:

1. Install the tooling from this repository into your IDE: http://download.eclipsesource.com/~hstaudacher/warproducts/
2. Set up your target. You need to download these bundles and add them to your target installation. (Don’t forget to refresh the target afterwards.)

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!

Tags: equinox, indigo, OSGi, pde, rap, soc, war deployment

What do the following people have in common:

1. Andre Oosthuizen
2. Ed Burnette
3. Euxx
4. Frank Sauer
5. Gunnar Wagenknecht
6. Luis de la Rosa
7. Martin Perez
8. Vasanth Dharmaraj

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).

Tags: planeteclipse

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

Tags: e4, eclipsecon, mars, rap, rover

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.

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.

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.

Tags: democamp, eclipseRT, egit, equinox, helios, rap, rcp, swt, talks

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.

Tags: democamp, eclipse, emf, helios, rap