Manuel Woelker
Persistent Trees in git, Clojure and CouchDB
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 developer I always find it interesting to take a look at the implementation details, because there is often a lot to be learned. It’s not always something you might need right now, but maybe a few years down the line you may be confronted with a similar problem. Plus - in my opinion - knowing a bit about the internals of a program helps reasoning about its behaviour.
Maven in Eclipse
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 example. At the same time, I was intrigued: if a tool like maven is seeing such a widespread use despite its cumbersome format, there must something to make up for it. My curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to give it a shot. I figured there might be some tooling available to help ease the pain.
Type Inference at Design Time via Eclipse
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 static typed languages (I’m saving that discussion for later). Instead, I want to take a look at one of the cool ideas in dynamic language design and demonstrate how Eclipse can somewhat emulate it.
Beyond XML: The Future of Extensible Metaformats
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.
XML: Still No Silver Bullet
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 development process a lot easier. But I still feel that there are some severe shortcomings when it comes to the general format itself and and the concrete implementation of XML dialects that I want to discuss in this blog post.
Why is that button gray?
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 elements (most often in the form of grayed out buttons and menu entries)? The visual cue here is that the action is not available at the moment. While that information is quite convenient, it raises the obvious question of:
Groovy, Eclipse Commands and Expressions
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 overhead of loading all the classes for dozens of plugins to determine which commands are available… and instead use a lightweight alternative inside the plugin.xml file. This neatly sidesteps all the osgi class loading runtime overhead, making the eclipse experience fast and snappy. And I have to admit I am a sucker for speed. So I am on board with the concept but how things work in practice aren’t optimal in my opinion.
Check out the Eclipse project dashboard
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 communication distances are so much shorter. While the internet has revolutionized the way we think about global communication, oftentimes it still doesn’t beat ad-hoc face-to-face conversations. So there was a lot to learn from just listening in on conversations (maybe that’s the secret of twitter) or throwing a question into a room full of highly intelligent people from various backgrounds.
Make p2, not war!
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 of course) to deploy new versions of software along with relevant updates. Traditional “.war” deployments are very monolithic and inflexible. The deployment model is simplistic as you only have to support a single version (which may be advantageous to some). But for our needs, we needed a more modular approach to the problem. Since we are not in the business of reinventing circular transportation devices, we started looking at some existing technologies to get as much mileage as possible - so we can concentrate on other neat features.
Git BoF @ EclipseCon
EclipseCon is coming up, and to my big suprise the Git BoF got accepted.
Unit testing revelations
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.
Exceptions From a User's Perspective
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:
The new Eclipse download wizard and RAP performance
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 technology – namely RAP for the web frontend and Equinox P2 for the installer. Before exposing the wizard to a wider audience, we had one burning question: Does it scale up to the volume of downloads being served by Eclipse.org? Read on to find out.