Manuel Woelker

Persistent Trees in git, Clojure and CouchDB

December 13, 2009

This is a tale of three images. I found these images while investigating the internals of several different applications. There are some really neat software projects emerging at the moment, and as a …

Maven in Eclipse

September 17, 2009

In the past I have said some unkind words about about maven’s pom.xml format. My aversion to xml heavy configuration has drawn me to more lightweight approaches to build systems, like gradle for …

Type Inference at Design Time via Eclipse

August 17, 2009

Dynamically typed programming languages have become more popular over the recent years. Dynamic typing makes certain tasks a lot easier, however, I will not go into a full discussion of dynamic versus …

Beyond XML: The Future of Extensible Metaformats

August 11, 2009

Yesterday I discussed some of the issues with XML. Today I’ll be taking a look at three of the potential alternatives that may improve on the current situation. YAML YAML Ain’t Markup Language. To …

XML: Still No Silver Bullet

August 10, 2009

The XML format has done a lot in the last decade to reduce some of the pains of legacy formats and to encourage application interoperability. Having a standardized syntax and object model makes the …

Why is that button gray?

August 6, 2009

There is a user interface design issue that has been bugging me for quite some time, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it until recently. How do you best represent disabled interaction …

Groovy, Eclipse Commands and Expressions

July 14, 2009

During my last project I had the dubious joy to work with a boatload of command framework expressions (activeWhen, enabledWhen). I appreciate the need for such a framework… don’t go through the …

Check out the Eclipse project dashboard

March 30, 2009

EclipseCon was quite a blast, lots of amazing talks, some very engaging keynotes and loads of interesting people to meet. One of the neat things about having everyone in one place is that the …

Make p2, not war!

March 17, 2009

I’ve been busy this weekend preparing one of the EclipseCon talks I will be doing together with Jordi. The background story to this talk is that we wanted to make it easier for users of Yoxos (and us …

Git BoF @ EclipseCon

March 2, 2009

EclipseCon is coming up, and to my big suprise the Git BoF got accepted. Initially, this BoF proposal was just a way to get the ball rolling on distributed version control systems at eclipse. In the …

Unit testing revelations

February 17, 2009

The other day I experienced an unexpected light bulb moment concerning unit testing. Maybe this one is obvious to most of you, but I wish someone would have told me earlier. So here goes. My biggest …

Exceptions From a User's Perspective

January 29, 2009

I have been pondering exceptions quite a lot lately. Especially how to break the bad news to the user. From a user’s point of view there are three categories of errors: 1. User or domain errors These …

The new Eclipse download wizard and RAP performance

September 17, 2008

The Eclipse Packaging Project is working on a wizard that allows you to build your own customizable download, combining plug-ins from predefined packages and Ganymede. The wizard uses Eclipse runtime …