Philipp's Eclipse and Java blog

JAX Innovation Award 2007

2007-02-07T15:56:00.000Z

The JAX Innvotion Award 2007 is calling for submissions.

The JAX Innovation Award is focused on the European market and
honours the most remarkable and outstanding contributions in the world
of Java, Eclipse and - new - SOA. The prize money, a whopping 20.000
Euro, is up for grabs.

Pretty much anyone can hand in a contribution by March 19th 2007 as long as it lives in the world of Java, Eclipse or SOA.

Eclipse History Podcasts

2006-11-09T09:21:00.000Z

During the last couple of days I have learned a lot about the history of the Eclipse Project. There is actually more on the web then I expected to find.

Now, John Kellerman pointed me to 2 really interesting Podcasts on Eclipse history. Check them out at IBM developerworks.

Part 1
Part 2

Stuttgart celebrates 5th Eclipse with special guest

2006-11-07T21:10:00.000Z

I just got back from the Eclipse Happy Birthday party in Stuttgart. Most of the guys are probably still there enjoying the nice buffet and cocktails. As usual I will post pictures later on.

It was a great gathering of probably 70 people (I am bad at guessing crowds). Special guest at our event was Erich Gamma, one of the godfathers of Eclipse. Unfortunately I didnt get the chance to talk to him. Erich gave a brief overview of the way from closed to open source and lined out some interesting facts. Again, one of the core messages was that Eclipse lifes trough its community. This is also what Mike mentions in his blog today. We then switched to Erich's colleagues in Zurich (Daniel Megert and Martin Eschlikon) who gave a very cool and funny look back into former Eclipse versions.
This Stuttgart-Zurich interaction talk was followed by a interesting Eclipse facts quiz. I only knew the answers to questions who didnt win prices, but other were more lucky and the guys handed out books, eclipse shirts and umbrellas.

The crowd then motioned down to the main hall of the "Alte Scheune" (old barn) and started the cosy part of the night. All in all a great evening and lots of Eclipse enthusiastic people.

Hope all the other parties are as good as this one was, although it will be hard to beat Stuttgart :)

Eclipse turns 5 talk

2006-10-27T12:17:00.000Z

As we are approaching the 5th birthday of Eclipse I am preparing a talk that I will hold at the IBM Germany lab on the 14th of November.

I am planing to give a brief overview of the steps Eclipse has taken in those 5 years and then talk about where we are now, giving a rough tour through Callisto. Is anyone giving similar presentations and interested to share slides and ideas ?

I have just downloaded and installed Eclipse 1 which I havent touched for the last 3 years or so. Its amazing how used you can get to those nice features provided in Eclipse 2 and 3. I was typing sysout and pressing ctrl+space and nothing happend :)

I took 2 screenshots to compare Eclipse 1 and Callisto. I will probably use them in one of my slides. Its quite cool to look back and see what Eclipse 1 was like, and its still working fine and easy to use.

Eclipse 1

Callisto

Eclipse Summit Day 2

2006-10-12T18:19:00.000Z

Eclipse Summit finished with a great applause for the whole crew today. It was a really good success from my point of view and I believe many others feel the same. There where 3 tracks of talks and 4 symposia going on through the 2 days.

The overall message that came across was that Eclipse really is run by its Community. And there was lots of community stuff going on. I think one of the real benefits of those conferences is not only the presentations but rather the getting together during lunch, breakfast and dinner and talking to each other.

Here are some pix from day 2

The modeling guys presenting their new logo

The closing plenary (wrap up of the symposia)

The Eclipse Bistro

Wayne sells RCP :-)

Eclipse Summit Day 1

2006-10-11T20:37:00.000Z

The first day of the Eclipse Summit Europe is already over. It has been a very great event. The Neckar Forum is a nice location with lots of good food :)

I tried to visit at least one talk of each of the tracks. I spent most of my time in the foundation track though. I think the Summit is success already after day1. People seem to have enjoyed it and the atmosphere was great. Looking forward to some interesting talks tomorrow. For example the talks on Modelling in Eclipse and Waynes talk on RCP.

Here are a few pix from day1.

TPTP Session

Outside

The Buffet

The Foyer

Reception

Eclipse Summit Europe

2006-10-11T06:22:00.000Z

I have just arrived at Eclipse Summit a few minutes ago. Mike will start with a keynote in a few minutes and then I will be switching back and forth between the Callisto and the Foundation Track. I have seen some familar faces from the Planeteclipse and hope to get in touch later. Will try and post some pictures here during the conference.

IBM supports raw Eclipse

2006-09-14T08:27:00.000Z

According to this article IBM will extend their support to the Eclipse Platform, meaning there will not only be support for IBM products based on Eclipse, but also for the core Platform functionality such as JDT or PDE. The support will be based on Eclipse version 3.2.

A nice outcome for the open source community is the new Eclipse section on developerWorks which provides tutorials and articles about Eclipse. That's where you will find for example Chris' 15 minutes GMF tutorial or my article on Cheat Sheets for Eclipse 3.2.

Cheat Sheets updated

2006-08-09T10:54:00.000Z

I havent posted here for a while due to a quite tight schedule at work. However, meanwhile I have been working on a little update of my Cheat Sheet tutorial from last December. It was published at developerworks yesterday and you can find it here.

The article looks into new Cheat Sheet features in Eclipse V3.2, going a bit into detail with the new composite Cheat Sheets.

Decorated Fields in Eclipse

2006-06-09T13:14:00.000Z

With Eclipse 3.2 a new JFace API is released addressing decorated fields. Everyone knows the little yellow light bulb that comes up if you want to create a new Java type and do not specify any package name.

Also a content assistant is provide that helps you choosing a package name. In Eclipse 3.2 this is now API and developers can use the feature to improve the user experience, especially in the area of validating user input.

I have put some sample code together that simply creates a decorated text field with a message. The user should provide a name. The name must not start with a blank though. In case it does, I show a little error sign that is augmented with a message.

If the user presses F1 in the field a content assitant pops up and proposes funny old german names that even google does not know :)

Here is the code snippet:

// a new shell
Shell shell = new Shell();
shell.setLayout(new FillLayout());
shell.setText("Name");
shell.setBounds(200, 200, 200, 200);

// a parent
Composite parentComposite = new Composite(shell, SWT.NONE);
parentComposite.setLayout(new GridLayout(2, false));

// a label
Label nameLabel = new Label(parentComposite, SWT.NONE);
nameLabel.setText("Type a name:");

// a field
final DecoratedField field = new DecoratedField(parentComposite,
SWT.NONE, new IControlCreator() {

public Control createControl(Composite parent, int style) {
// create a simple text control
Text nameText = new Text(parent, SWT.BORDER);
nameText.setLayoutData(new GridData(GridData.FILL_HORIZONTAL));
return nameText;
}
});
final Text text = (Text) field.getControl();

// create an error decoration
final FieldDecoration decoration = FieldDecorationRegistry.getDefault()
.getFieldDecoration(FieldDecorationRegistry.DEC_ERROR);
decoration.setDescription("A name must not start with a blank.");
field.addFieldDecoration(decoration, SWT.LEFT | SWT.TOP, true);

// create a content proposal provider that simply provides some funny old German
// names
SimpleContentProposalProvider sampleNames = new SimpleContentProposalProvider(
new String[] { "Wernfried", "Irmhelm", "Hernmut", "Gottlob" });
// create a F1 keystroke, this can probably be done more elegant
KeyStroke f1Stroke = null;
try {
f1Stroke = KeyStroke.getInstance("F1");
} catch (ParseException e1) {
// hope the KeyStroke.getInstance() works :)
}

// add a proposal adapter to our text field
ContentProposalAdapter adapter = new ContentProposalAdapter(text,
new TextContentAdapter(), sampleNames, f1Stroke, null);

// react on text changes and show error if needed
text.addModifyListener(new ModifyListener() {

public void modifyText(ModifyEvent e) {
if (text.getText().startsWith(" ")) {
field.showDecoration(decoration);
return;
}
field.hideDecoration(decoration);

}
});
field.hideDecoration(decoration);
shell.open();

The code above really just covers a simple implementation. There is much more behind the concept of decorated fields and much more flexibility. I am planing on writing a more in detail article or HOWTO about decorated fields.

Variable Prefixes

2006-03-09T11:28:00.000Z

When writing Java classes I often label my global variables (fields) with a lower case "f" as prefix. This is just to distinguish from local variables while programming and making. Navigating through my preferences dialog the other day I found a nice option that supports this behavior.

Under Java > Code Style you will find a small table to edit prefix and suffix lists for different variable types.

Now when you create a new field and use code completion (ctrl+space) the assistant suggest a variable name starting with whatever prefix you have specified before.

Very nice feature. It would be even more usefull if it let me type a variable name and then suggest adding a prefix when I press ctrl+space.

Quick view on the BPEL Designer

2006-02-28T15:02:00.000Z

I have been playing around with the first code drop of the Eclipse BPEL Designer during the last couple of days. It's a quite impressive and neat tool. The current status allows you to open, view, edit and save a .bpel file using the editor. New activities can simply be created by dragging and dropping them from the palette into the editor. Their properties can be modified using the properties view which comes in the new tabbed style.

So basically you are able to model a business process according to the BPEL 1.1 spec. The only little discomfort is that you can not yet create a .bpel file using a wizard. However, if you start from the samples provided you can get along quite well :)

The BPEL editor comes with a set of extension points that enable 3rd party vendors to bind their BPEL runtime or define new component palettes.

There is lots of more stuff to come in the future milestones (including validation, creation wizards, debug, integrating with runtimes etc.) and a first release (1.0) is tentatively scheduled for 1st of October 2006.

More information and resources are available at the BPEL Designer website.

What is my selection ?

2006-02-24T08:36:00.000Z

Do you know that problem? There is a view in Eclipse displaying some artficats and you want to contribute a new popup menu entry for them. So you go ahead and create a new objectContribution for the org.eclipse.ui.popupMenus extension point. The only question is, what object type do I want to contribute the entry for? How do I find out what kind of objects are displayed?

One way is to go and have a look at the source code of any view that displays this object and dig a bit in their label or content provider. Doing so you need to find out where the view is implemented and so on ...

I have written a tiny tool that should make things easier here and shows the type of the object selected. You simply right click an object in a view and select "Show selection".

A small message box will pop-up presenting some information about the object you selected.

Typically in your extension you would want to specify one of the interfaces for the object type to contribute a menu entry for.

To many people have asked me to tell them what type of object they are seeing because they want to contribute an action or menu. I was just sick of searching everytime :) You can download the plugin including sources here.

Eclipse 3.2 M5

2006-02-20T08:25:00.000Z

Eclipse 3.2 Milestone 5 was released just before the weekend. I haven't had much time to look into it over the weekend so it was the first thing I did this morning. There are lots of new nice and helpfull features available. I am impressed how everytime I download a new Milestone things still improve and new features appear. This is fantastic for experienced users. However I am a bit worried that at some stage "newcommers" will be overwhelmed by the functionality.

Nevertheless, I tested a few of the new features and here are my favorite 3:

Generate hashCode() and equals()

This new source action allows you to generate the hashCode() and equals() method for a class. You can select the fields to be inlcuded in the methods. Especially when having lots of fields, generating that code is so helpfull. And most of all you don't forget to override hashCode() when you override equals(), which still is a common mistake :)
Variable name completion

When creating a new variable and specifying a name the code completion will try and complete the variable name even if characters are typed that do not match.

Example: String fMy is completed to fMyString
Grouping problems

It is now possible to group problems by different specifiers, e.g. by Java Problem Type.

Find out more about new features at the New and Noteworthy list and download Eclipse 3.2 M5 here.

Cheat Sheets in Eclipse

2006-02-15T09:54:00.000Z

Cheat Sheets are an evolving technology in Eclipse, especially for companies that build complex products based on Eclipse. Cheat Sheets are some kind of "semi-automatic" tutorials that guide you through complex tasks of a product. Let's take the famous "Hello World". One example of a Cheat Sheet is, how to create a new plug-in that says "Hello World". The tutorial would guide you through the steps of creating, implementing and running the plug-in. Some of the steps, like creating a project, can be executed automatically.

Cheat Sheets are integrated into Eclipse as a view and hence can be read and performed whithout leaving the workbench.

I recently published a tutorial on how to create Cheat Sheets.

Welcome to my blog

2006-02-15T09:06:00.000Z

Blogging becomes more and more popular not only for private use but also in the industry. There is a big blog community growing at the moment around Eclipse. People use blogs to share ideas, visions, tips and tricks as well as problems and news about Eclipse. Well there is one more now ! :-)

Welcome to my Eclipse and Java blog. I will try and post some interesting stuff about my experience with Eclipse and my daily work in that area. Have fun ...

-Philipp