Awhile ago, I blogged about adding bundles to your Java search scope. As an exercise born out of frustration while on a plane, I made this a bit easier to do in the upcoming Eclipse 3.5M6 release: There's a command now to add all the bundles in your target to the Java search scope. Enjoy....
Read MoreThe 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 gripes with unit testing has been that I couldn't get any satisfactory answers to these two questions: 1. Why should I practice Test-First? 2. How do...
Read MoreThe introduction of the databinding framework in Eclipse 3.3 is with no doubt one of the most useful tools in the hands of the form developer. The ability to transform and validate user input in such a flexible and reusable way is a great enhancement. But where there is light, there is shadow. Sometimes there is just no IObservable available for your target or model...
Read MoreEvery once in a while something just doesn't happen to be as intiutive as you would have liked it to be. Lately I was trying to contribute a simple command based toggle button to the workbench. Although it is simple to actually provide the menu contribution and to put the button in visual "toggle" mode, it was so straight forward to actually obtain the state...
Read MoreHave you ever come across an issue while developing an Eclipse-based application, go to export it and get an evil "Invalid character constant" message or something similar in your logs? This happens when you're developing an application that requires Unicode characters but your system file encoding is something other than you expect (i.e., on Macs it's usually MacRoman and on Windows it's Cp1252). When you...
Read MoreIn Eclipse 3.5M4, there's new functionality in PDE to help you generate NL fragments. If you have already externalized strings (PDE Tools->Externalize Strings) in your plug-ins, you can internationalize them by using the internationalization wizard (PDE Tools->Internationalize). Choose the languages relevant to you, press finish and go!...
Read MoreI recently spent some time with a client removing some cycles in bundles and discussing why cycles are evil in the first place. The problem is that even if you remove cycles from your own code, the code you depend on may not be cycle-free. This could be for many reasons, most of the time it's due to legacy. So after some bundle cleansing, we...
Read MoreA recurring question in the RAP community is, "How good is the performance of my RAP application"? Now you can measure it for yourself on the Amazon cloud. In this tutorial I will show you how to set up your own load testing for a RAP application deployed on Amazon's rent-by-the-hour servers, also know as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure. We will setup...
Read MoreI was working with a client recently and the question of what are execution environments came up. Execution environments (EEs) are simply symbolic representations of JREs. For example, rather than talking about a specific JRE (with a specific name at a specific location on your disk), you can talk about the J2SE-1.4 execution environment. This way things can be shared without referencing specific paths. Furthermore,...
Read MoreEver wanted to add spelling checking to a dialog, form or some editor in your Eclipse-based application? Well, I needed to do this recently for a project and thought I would share with people how it can be done (also, I had people emailing me to write more tips ;p). The spell checking infrastructure in Eclipse is handled by the text editor framework. Specifically, there's an...
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