I recently had a few people come to me to chat about the OSGi EventAdmin service. For those who are curious, the EventAdmin service is part of the OSGi Compendium Specification and allows you to publish and listen to events via a pub-sub system. I'll try to do a quick write up on how to actually use the service. As with any OSGi service, the...
Read MoreWith 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...
Read MoreLast week, the Eclipse e4 project had its alpha release. What's e4? It's simply the next generation of the Eclipse platform. The Eclipse platform team has learned a lot of lessons since the Eclipse project started and it's time to experiment and innovate. There's also a desire to involve more people at the platform level. To get a better idea of where e4 is going, here's some resources: e4...
Read MoreWe try hard to enable a "sexy" look and feel for Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) applications. However, without rounded borders and gradients you can hardly create a website that look modern. Take this dialog as an example: It looks so much better with rounded borders on Shell, Control and with these Button gradients: The latter screenshot has been taken from the current RAP development stream. These features...
Read Moree4 0.9M5 is now available for download. One of the things that excites me about this work is the web based form editors that Boris Bokowski has been working on. The form editors have always tried to mimic a web look and feel, but now they are using real web technology. The e4 team has even integrated these editors with the workbench. For a complete list of...
Read MoreIt's great to see a new milestone of e4 released (new and noteworthy)! The major new and noteworthy item in my opinion is that XWT was included for the first time in e4: What is XWT? XWT is a declarative widget framework that allows you to specify UI components in a declarative fashion. SWT code is generated automatically from an XML-based UI declaration. It's kind of nice...
Read MoreOk, 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...
Read MoreOver the past week I have ignored my daughters, gave-up on work, haven't seem my wife, and managed to create a web-enabled version of Zest. Ok, most of what I said is lie, however, I did manage to create a web-enabled version of Zest while still spending quality time with the family (and getting some "real work" done). How you ask? The magic of "SWT Browser...
Read MoreWow, I just saw the new and noteworthy posted for the first e4 milestone. There's a lot of stuff there! I'm amazed that the e4 team was able to get this milestone out given that a lot of them were also working on the Eclipse 3.5M5 release. Anyways, here are some of my favorite noteworthy items: CSS Support for SWT RCP Mail CSS Example SWT Browser Edition Heck, there's even...
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