Benjamin Muskalla
Using Equinox Security in RCP and RAP
I finally had the time to care about one of my outstanding tasks - provide a tutorial and example how to use Equinox Security. While the tutorial was initially targeted for RAP users, I also added a launch config and a target definition for RCP as the code is the same for both runtimes. The tutorial will provide some hints and pointers how to setup your login procedure, like shown below:
Google Summer of Code 2010 is on!
Finally the voting process for this years Google Summer of Code is over and they announced the accepted students. I’m really happy that so many interesting proposals got trough and really looking forward to see the outcome of all the student projects.
Sketch your UI
From time to time, I’m in the situation when I want to suggest a UI change or even try to come up with a completely new UI. While I love programming, it may be easier in these situations to just “sketch” the idea instead of really getting your feet wet. As many people asked me what I use for UI sketches, I thought I should share it with you - the tool is called WireframeSketcher. It’s “just” an Eclipse plugin to create sketches pretty easily. As most of the UIs in my life are SWT-based, WireframeSketcher comes with one absolutely cool feature - turn an existing dialog into a sketch. Fire up any dialog, hit the magic “Alt+Shift+F5” and you’re done. Is it that easy? Yes - I really love it. Here is an example of the Import Wizard which I also used in my latest blog post to further modify it with my ideas.
Eclipse DemoCamp 2010 in Mannheim
Ever been to Mannheim? If not - this is your chance to visit this lovely city. For the Helios release, the guys behind the majug² (Mannheimer Java user Group) invite everybody to the Helios Democamp in June. And as Ian already found out: Yes, we love our DemoCamps! It’s always great to have technical discussions over a frosty beverage!
Drawing with RAP? Yup!
I have to admit, I’m a little nervous what happens with the RAP community after this post. At least for me, the last days were pretty exciting. Some days ago, Ivan from the RAP team committed the initial support for a GC (GraphicsContext) for RAP. Currently restricted to the Canvas widget, the GC provides thousands of new use cases for RAP applications. The work by Ivan and Tim is just gorgeous and will help many developers to single-source their applications with even less exceptions. In case you want to try it out in this second without reading further, just fire up the RAP Examples demo and draw something yourself :)
Revamping Eclipse Examples?
Even though I’ve been involved in the Eclipse community for around 5 years, I’m still amazed by the projects that are hosted under the Eclipse umbrella. As an “insider”, I have a pretty good overview of many projects and at least a rough picture of all the other cool stuff. While I love working with EclipseRT technologies like Equinox, RAP, EclipseLink, ECF or
EMF and RAP - what a lovely pair
During the last weeks, Kenn and I worked together to support EMF generated editors running on RAP. I’m always mesmerized by how effective such synergies can be used when people from different teams work together for a bigger goal. Kudos to Kenn for his great work in EMF by refactoring the EMF UI bundles (namely o.e.emf.ui.common and o.e.emf.ui.edit) in order to single-source them. But what does that mean for the community?
EclipseRT & RAP around the world
We’re all looking forward to talk about EclipseRT, Equinox and RAP at the DemoCamps around the world. In case you want to catch us and talk about Eclipse and related topics, just join one of the DemoCamps near you. Besides many other interesting talks, we’ll mostly cover EclipseRT, RAP and p2.
Eclipse RAP 1.3 M2 Released
The RAP team is proud to announce the second milestone for the Helios release.
Picasso paints the web with RAP
Whenever I’m working on UI stuff, something always goes terribly wrong ;-) Sometimes it’s only a margin or padding, other times it a composite that crosses my path. I was pretty happy that Chris Aniszczyk and Simon Archer hacked together Picasso, which helps you to identify some of these layout issues. As you may know, most of the time I work on the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and come across the same issues. As Picasso was originally intended to work for RCP, it’s not a long way to get it working for RAP.
Eclipse e4 on the web
With e4 0.9 out in the wild, we should think again about the goals e4 tries to provide. One of them was to reduce the gap between Desktop and Web - not only speaking of reusing widgets but also to enable the platform handle multi-user scenarios. While the core e4 team concentrated on eliminating bad smells like singletons, the RAP team worked on better support for single sourcing applications in general. With an experimental version of RAP which includes some features not yet in the current release, we were able to run the demo out of the box including the whole underlying infrastructure like the modeled workbench - without touching the e4 code.
Integrating BIRT into RAP applications
Finally I had some time to write down some of my experiences with integrating the Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) into a Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) application. I wrote it all down in a small tutorial that shows how you can integrate charts and reports seamlessly in your RAP application. Topics covered in the tutorial include how to setup the environment to let BIRT and RAP play well together.
Eclipse Galileo and RAP
As Galileo is out in the wild and we are all already working on Helios… I thought it would be handy to give a quick overview of the New and Noteworthy features the RAP team worked on for Galileo. Besides many, many bug fixes… we still found time to provide several new features. On top of the new features, we focused on making single sourcing even easier to do.
Tease the RAP committers!
Ok, it’s getting tough. Only 9 days left before EclipseCon officially starts. All contributors and committers around me are already swarming around to get the demos and presentations ready - besides fixing bugs for the upcoming M6 build. But why is everybody so excited about EclipseCon? I think the numerous talks are only one side of the coin. Personally the way more interesting part is the come-together of all people you know from bug reports, mailing lists and newsgroups. While it is nice to see each other, it often brings up great discussions about Eclipse technology - especially interesting for me: RAP and E4.