Mike`s Blog - Eclipse

Visual Twitter

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:02:49 +0100

Played a bit with my own twitter client and pimped it to visualize replies. It uses Neo4j for the relationships and Eclipse GEF ZEST for the visualization. New incoming tweets are analyzed for @-replies and integrated into the graph in realtime, but animation is missing and manual layouting is still needed to get some clear structure (see first screenshot).

The Radial layout algorithm does a good job though, but it's not the perfect solution for this problem (left side). Applying first the Radial layout and then the Horizontal Shift layout however shows a nice effect (also added profile images):

Eclipse Console limit

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:10:11 +0200

Over years, i extended Eclipse's System.out Console view limit manually to 1MB, so there's more of the log file output to read than just the default of 80kb, which is just too little for the usual clutter of enterprise application logging.

Today, a fellow developer showed me how to circumvent the limit. She pointed out that there's a checkbox to disable the limitation of the console. A neat little checkbox and I missed it for years.

My eyes probably just scanned over the preference dialog and did never recognize it. But see for yourself, it's right there and always has been:

Keyboard Shortcuts

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:45:00 +0100

Nice to see that Chetan Kumar Kotha found out about Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown in Eclipse IDE.

However, there's a small caveat here: it doesn't work if one of the open files is an XML file. Let me explain: While tabbing through the open editors using Ctrl-PgDown you come accross an XML Editor (or in fact any other MultiPageEditor) which will then grab the tabbing focus to its child tabs. Within the same editor, the next Ctrl-PgDown will lead to a switch from "Design" view to "Source" View.

Continue reading "Keyboard Shortcuts"

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 2

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:18:58 +0100

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 2

The day (Thursday, 20.11.2008) began with the keynote of David Wood from Symbian. He talked about why mobile software must go open source and how they're going to approach it or already doing it. Some time in the future, they're going to move on to the SFL and EPL licenses with their 40 million lines of code. He sees the claims of the open source community to be for example "faster time to market", "more eyeballs looking on the code" and lower barriers of collaboration. They seem to focus on the lower barriers. He gave a short overview of some licensing models, including weak and strong copyleft. Interesting was the part about the "Six laws of fragmentation", where one solution is clear leadership for the coding together with a powerful platform, which is therefore unlikely to be forked. As forks would be fragmentation. He sees Java as one sort of "intermediate layer" to hide OS diversity from an application.

Continue reading "Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 2"

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 1

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:41:25 +0100

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 1

This year's the first time I attended an Eclipse-related conference: the Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart in Germany. There were so many intersting talks on the schedule and so i didn't plan exactly to which i'm going to listen to. I arrived in Ludwigsburg on 19.11.2008 at the "Forum am Schlosspark" just in time for the Keynote of Dave Thomas at 9 o'clock.

Continue reading "Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Part 1"

Committer Status

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:20:00 +0200

After doing some paperwork, I got my full Eclipse Committer Status to the technology.soc projec today.

Java Code Generation with Eclipse and AST

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:52:52 +0200

As Mateusz asked for how to add Newlines to generated code in Eclipse, i looked at how Eclipse JDT is doing it. And of course, the Eclipse guys eat their own dog food and use the abstract syntax tree (AST) feature.

For a showcase, let's assume we've got an open Java Editor with an empty class and we want to add a new method. For the sake of simplicity for the demo, i'm going to implement it in an action and use the current editor as target. That's not nice, but pretty simple for now:

IWorkbench workbench = PlatformUI.getWorkbench();
IWorkbenchWindow window = workbench.getActiveWorkbenchWindow();
IWorkbenchPage page = window.getActivePage();
IEditorPart editor = page.getActiveEditor();
IEditorInput input = editor.getEditorInput();
IJavaElement element = JavaUI.getEditorInputJavaElement(input);

Continue reading "Java Code Generation with Eclipse and AST"

Eclipse ToString

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:44:37 +0200

This year's Google Summer Of Code 2008 project is sponsoring a new feature for the Eclipse IDE: a ToString generator (See Eclipse Bugzilla 26070). Since there are already two generators in Eclipse JDT for hashCode() and equals() methods (since 3.2), having the third one there, too, would be just natural. Many developers have waited long time for this to come, and I hope we don't have to wait any much longer and that it will make it into the Eclipse Java Development Tools fast.

According to lemmy (the main project mentor), Google has accepted the application of Mateusz, so planning and development can start right away

Continue reading "Eclipse ToString"

Eclipse Common Navigator

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:32:48 +0200

I worked today on using the Common Navigator in Eclipse to provide a central place for reference data management. Our RCP application consists of several (rather independent) business applications, each of which wants to have an administrative area to configure stem data. To bring all that together, i tried to use the Common Navigator Framework.

It's really tough, the learning curve, as you need to do at least 10 steps to just let some simple entries appear. But it's worth it.

Michael D. Elder has some really good tutorials on the Common Navigator, check them out!

After i fiddled with the Navigator's setup, the content provider and the binding stuff, I could easy add some actions to the context menu of my business domain objects. I know, this would have been a perfect job for EMF.

Accessing resource files within your Eclipse plugins

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0100

Sometimes, especially in the development phase, you want to get your Eclipse Plugin's absolute file system location on the disk. Usually, you want to have a java.io.File. Since Eclipse mainly uses URLs to locate resources, it's not an easy one-liner to get the location. However, the utility class org.eclipse.core.runtime.FileLocator comes to the rescue:

URL bundleRoot = getBundle().getEntry("/");
URL fileURL = FileLocator.toFileURL(bundleRoot);
java.io.File file = new java.io.File(fileURL.toURI());

System.out.println("Bundle location:" + file.getAbsolutePath());

Note: please be aware that your plugin should be normally packaged as jar file and thus the above code does not work any more in a packaged deployment! To get this working, you must set the unpack attribute in your feature for the plugin.

What you really want to do is to use getBundle().getEntry("/file.txt").openStream() to get the contents of a file which is located within your plugin.

The code above is called from within a Plugin Activator class and uses the shortcut getBundle() method. If you need the code outside of an Activator class, use the Platform to resolve the bundle first. A one-liner looks like this:

new File(FileLocator.toFileURL(Platform.getBundle(
     pluginId).getEntry("/")).toURI());

Optionally Required

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0100

Ever wondered what the error message Missing optionally required bundle means?

!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.emf.edit.ui 2 0 2007-01-02 16:42:41.082 !MESSAGE Missing optionally required bundle org.eclipse.ui.ide_[3.2.0,4.0.0).

Eclipse tries to tell you that the bundle org.eclipse.emf.edit.ui can make use of org.eclipse.ui.ide, but it is not strictly necessary for emf.edit.ui to work. In fact, emf.edit.ui uses services from ui.ide if they are existant. If not, it just doesn't use them.

The error message in the /configuration/.log is not an error message, but more an informative level message.

So, if your RCP application doesn't start and you find this message in the .log file, you can safely ignore it and focus on resolving the other messages first.

Product Launcher Icons

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0100

If you want to brand your Eclipse RCP product launcher with your own icons, you need to either supply some bitmaps or a single Windows Icon file. The problem here, besides the boring work of creating 7 similar files, is that you need some of them in 32-bit. None of the usual imaging tools I have installed were capable of creating 32 Bit Windows Bitmaps: Irfanview, The Gimp, .. not even Microsoft Paint of Windows XP could create this format.

Use the Eclipse Product Editor to specify which Icons to use for the Launcher Executable

Once again, the Eclipse IRC channel #eclipse on Freenode came to the rescue and provided some hints: The Microsoft MSDN Library contains a tool which can be used to create the 32 Bit Bitmaps used for Windows XP. However, I choosed to evaluate a tool named Microangelo Studio to creat the .ico File. Pasting the product logo into the editor and adding a new format for each of the required dimensions and color depths.

The last thing I need to do is to explain all that to my designer. My logos are pretty ugly and haven't even transparent background. This looks like Windows 3.0 and will probably frighten the users.