Marcus Baker wrote an article called “Install Me“, which was published in the book “97 things a programmer should know“. On two pages he shows the reader exactly how important the first minutes are when a new user tries to get familiar with your software. He argues that it is the responsibility of  the software developer, to make it as easy as possible for the user to see that your software is what he needs.

Currently we don’t do a good job with this at EclipseRT. There are several EclipseRT technologies out there and every one provides an individual starting point for new users. From my point of view, changing this would bring EclipseRT a big step further.

That’s the inspiration behind the RTP project.  All that a user should have to do is download – install – run. The idea is to create one or more common starting points that new users can use to get familiar with EclipseRT technology.  Once we have the installation accomplished, we’ll have to convince the user with good examples and documentation. Investigation shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. If the user doesn’t see what he needs in his first five minutes, the software will not get a second chance. There is also the chance of course, that the annoyed user might spread the word that the software doesn’t do the job right.  So, its definitely worthwhile to invest in keeping new users happy.

And this is what RTP is all about:  working with as many EclipseRT projects as possible to provide a really good out-of-the box experience for new users. If you are interested in this project please let me know. We welcome all help towards succeeding with RTP. If you want to learn more about RTP there are also two EclipseCon 2011 submissions (submission 1, submission 2) you can read.

• 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!

This is done with an RowErrorMessageMarker. When hovering over the marked row, the corresponding error message will be shown in a tooltip.

IMarker marker = new RowErrorMessageMarker("An error message...", zorro);
tableRidget.addMarker(marker);
// to remove:
tableRidget.removeMarker(marker);

Full snippet here. This is shipping with the upcoming Riena 2.0 M6.

Ridgets wrap around standard SWT / RWT controls to provide additional functionality and a better API. One example that you can see below: Ridgets have “markers”, which tag a control as mandatory, wrong or read-only and change the control’s behavior accordingly.

It’s worth mentioning that all three screenshots run from the same code. The only difference is the target environment used (RAP or RCP).

Ridgets styled with RAP's "business" theme

Ridgets styled with RAP's "classic" theme

Ridgets in a regular RCP application

Once this work is completed the Ridget API will be usable for RAP applications as well.

To stay informed about this effort:

• CC yourself to Bug 302893, and
• come to our EclipseCon talk “Riena 2.0 - New & Noteworthy“

redView looks pretty promising, and although personally I am not a big fan of modeling and code generation there might be a sweet spot for redView for people who have tons of forms to fill in data.

One really nice thing about redView is that they created a detailled install instruction (a yoxos profile could probably help here), and a bunch of demos to get started.

http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/examples
http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/installation/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redview/files/

P.S: The obligatory question about single sourcing redView has been discussed, and as redView is EMF + Riena it looks feasible to get redViews working in RAP. Even the visual form designer imposes no hurdles that could not be overcome (plain SWT, no GEF).

1. Pluggable Marker Decorations

The new BorderMarkerSupport draws red-borders around a widget and replaces the standard ControlDecoration. You can select either error decoration style via the Look-and-Feel settings.

2. Enhanced Master/Details Widget

The Master/Details Widget automatically links a table with the details area on the bottom (or top). It is used heavily by some of Riena’s consumers. As a result we have been receiving good feedback and have added several requested features on this milestone:

• nicer border (includes button area, separates table from buttons with a single line)
• API to participate in the life-cycle (before / after selection, apply, remove, new)
• API to ‘suggest’ a new entry – it will show in the details area and Apply will enable
• API to tweak the margin and spacing of the Master/Details widget

3. Image Button Widget

The SWT Buttons have a system-defined look that is hard to customize (for example the background color cannot be changed). Riena’s ImageButton Widget emulates a button using three images (standard, hover, pushed state).

4. Multiple Default Buttons per Controller

Riena’s Controllers have a new API that supports several default buttons per controller. The default button has a blue glow when enabled. In that state it will automatically be pushed when the user hits ENTER (anywhere).

5. Controller Testing

Controller testing is now very straightforward and has been decoupled from the UI (widgets). Just subclass AbstractSubModuleControllerTest to get started. In addition your controller has to use the new API getRidget(Class, String) instead of getRidget(String). The package org.eclipse.riena.client.controller.test in the org.eclipse.riena.tests bundle has several examples.

Read the New & Noteworthy for additional details on these items.

For the curious, here is the schedule leading towards the December release:

• 12/04 – 1.2.0 RC1
• 12/11 – 1.2.0 RC2
• 12/15 – 1.2.0

After that the work will start concentrating on the summer release, which is part of the Helios release train.

* Eclipse RunTime Tutorial, Tue 9:00-12:00, Seminarräume 2-4 – This tutorial connects the dots between different runtime technologies, such as Equinox, Riena, RAP and EclipseLink

* Eclipse Riena Project – Overview and a new UI concept for RCP applications, Wed 11:20-12:00, Seminarräume 2-4 – This overview of Riena focuses on the framework’s UI concepts. Learn how to use navigation, styling and filtering to build better RCP applications.

* SWT Platform on QT – Overview and Demo, Thu 16:00-16:20, Seminarräume 2-4 – I’m very curious about this session. The screenshots I have seen looked very exciting. And the promise of taking advantage of QT’s extensive customization capabilities and build-in CSS support is appealing. Personally I’ve found SWT to be quite restrictive when it comes to styling and theming, so I am interested in all approaches that expand what you can do.

Kind regards,
Elias.

PS: I’m not attending this year, but several of my Riena colleagues will be there.

• New ridgets: ILinkRidget, IBrowserRidget, ITraverseRidget (for SWT’s Slider, Scale and Spinner widgets). Thanks to Florian from Redview for these contributions (snippets)
• IComboRidget now supports  CCombo: the CCombo widget works much better with our marker framework, since it supports different background colors (the regular combo does not!). Markers use background colors to point out required or incorrect data. Check out the new CCombo demo in the playground.
  
• MasterDetails improvements: (a) the MasterDetails widget now has an ‘auto apply’ mode, meaning that any changes done in the details area in the bottom will instantly be applied back to the original model in the table (snippet)
  (b) if you’ve edited the details and navigate away or hit the ‘New’ button, you’ll be warned that you’re about to discard your changes. If you find it annoying, you can also turn it off.
• Automatically synchronize enablement state of a label and another widget: Riena now has a mechanism that keeps the enabled-state of a label and another widget in lock-step. Example: you have a Label with the id “labelName” and a Text widget with the id “name”. If the text field is disabled, the label will be disabled too. The default strategy looks for the “label” prefix to associate two widgets with each other (i.e. labelXYZ <-> XYZ). However you can use the labelfinderstrategy extension point to provide a different strategy, if desired.

Kind regards,
Elias.

At ESE in a couple weeks we are running both an EclipseRT tutorial and symposium. A full day of runtime fun!  No idea what I’m talking about? EclipseRT is the community of people at Eclipse that are creating and using Eclipse technology in runtime (i.e., non-tooling) scenarios.

Turns out that there are a great number of projects involved and not just the ones in the RT top-level project.  BIRT, EMF, GEF, … all have runtime elements. The RT project itself hosts such leading runtime technology as Equinox (the OSGi and JSR232 reference implementation) EclipseLink (the JPA2 reference implementation), Jetty (very popular embeddable web server) and a host of other great projects like RAP, Riena, Swordfish, ECF, eRCP etc. No wonder we need a whole day to talk about all this.

The day starts with a 4 hour EclipseRT tutorial covering the Equinox, OSGi, server side use, tooling, RAP and single sourcing, Riena and EclipseLink. The tutorial will build on input from previous symposia where nearly everyone commented on the need for a good end to end example of Eclipse in the runtime world. We are using Toast, the example application from the upcoming OSGi and Equinox book and now part of the Eclipse Examples project.

After a full morning of learning, we’ll have a bit of an unconference style symposium to talk about issues and topics in the EclipseRT world. While the direction will depend significantly on who shows up, we hope to cover architecture and how promote integration and adoption, community issues such as release trains, repo organization etc and experience reports from the real world.

Presumably this will all be followed by a number of frosty beverages.

Check out the event wiki page for more information and evolving discussion topics.