If you are joining the Java Forum Stuttgart on the 01. July, I will be talking about Eclipse e4. While the slides will be in English my talk will be in German.
Hope to see you there.
Monthly Archives: June 2010
The next e4 killer feature? JDT on the move
Some people say that the Eclipse support for alternative JVM based languages is not best in class. Therefore I think it is great news that Olivier Thomann from the JDT team indicated that might open up JDT to better support Java like languages.
I think this would be great and definitely a mayor step for the Eclipse IDE. As far as I understood the Scala IDE and the Groovy support could be heavily improved if the JDT could allow these environments to leverage the JDT infrastructure.
I believe these are great news for the interested people and the Eclipse ecosystem.
Eclipse RCP Tutorial updated to Helios
I’m happy to announce that I updated the Eclipse RCP Tutorial to Helios. Looking at the revision history I was (again) surprised that I maintain this tutorial since Sep. 2007.
This time I made a full cycle; I tried not only to adjust the tutorial to the minor UI changes in Eclipse Helios but also to re-structure the tutorial and the text to improve it’s readability. I added more pictures which hopefully make the Plugin concept easier to understand.
Please note that the URL has changed to http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipseRCP/article.html so in case you have saved this link I encourage you to update this to the new URL. But URL forwarding is setup so don’t worry to much.
I hope this tutorial continue to help new RCP developers to find their way into the fascinating world of plugin and RCP development.
Have fun hacking Eclipse RCP! 
Eclipse 3.6 styling with CSS and the ThemeManager
Tom Schindl and Kai Tödter already blogged about the new Eclipse e4 ThemeManager. If you want to use the Eclipse ThemeManager and CSS Styling in Eclipse 3.6 you find an adjusted example “org.eclipse.e4.ui.examples.css.rcp” in the e4 repository. This example demonstrates the usage of the ThemeManager and Theme switching during runtime in Eclipse 3.6.
This is the colorful example. In case you are impressed with the design I would like to mention that I designed it myself. 
For the German Eclipse fans their will be an article in an upcoming Eclipse Magazin describing in detail how to set this up.
Eclipse Democamp Mannheim – Impressions
Yesterday we had the Eclipse Democamp Mannheim organized by the JUG Mannheim.
Despite having a temperature of more then 30 Celsius approx. 60 people showed up and enjoyed the talks about RAP, EGit, Eclipse Memory Analyser, redView, UML Lab, Eclipse e4 and Usus (a code checker tool). We also had several visitors which traveled quite a bit (for example from Dortmund, Saarbruecken and Kassel) to join the event.
Here a very photos about the event.
The room was packed.
Benjamin Muskalla about the news in Eclipse 3.6 RAP.
Jens Baumgart demonstrating EGit.
Markus Kohler showing Eclipse MAT:
Ekkehard Gentz delivering an overview of redView:
Manuel Bork with the UML Labs tools.
Nicole Rauch and Marc Philipp presenting their code checker tool USUS.
I demonstrated Eclipse e4 but have no photos to prove that.
Many thanks to the presenters Benjamin Muskalla, Jens Baumgart, Markus Kohler, Ekkehard Gentz, Manuel Bork and Nicole Rauch and Marc Philipp and to everyone who joined the event.
In case you joined the event, please leave a comment letting us know what you think about the first JUG Mannheim Eclipse Democamp.
Eclipse projects – The nature of things
Did you ever wounder what defines if a project is “pure” Java project or a Plugin project?
Have a look at the “.project” file. This file contains the description of your project. It contains a XML tag “natures” where the nature of the project is described. A plugin project has the nature “org.eclipse.pde.PluginNature” and a java project has the nature “org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature”.
These tags will also steer some behavior of the development environment, e.g. a project with PluginNature will update the java class path if you change the dependency information in a plugin project. For example if you add the “org.eclipse.pde.PluginNature” to an existing Java project you get the PDE menu for your project.
A week in the life using EGit
I decided to give EGit a try and use it for one of my pet projects for a week. As most of you know EGit is the Eclipse plugin for Git, the distributed version control system (DVCS) invented by Linus Torvalds.
My overall impression of EGit is good.
In the process of testing EGit I created a bunch of bug reports, some of them real bugs, others feature requests and others most likely misunderstandings on my side. I collected my bugs reports in this list; in case someone is interested.
That I really like about Egit is that you can Add and commit at the same time. It is also great that as of a few days “fast forward” merge in EGit works. Now lets hope for the true merge. See git-merge for the differences.
I think the UI need some more simplification so that normal users will be able to use it. See Fetch/Push dialog needs to be grossly simplified.
For me personally I think the Synchronization Feature is really critical; fortunately this is already covered by a GSoC project. Also I find the missing keybindings distracting.
Would I recommend using EGit for production projets at this stage? Difficult question….
I personally will definitely use it for some of my personal projects in the hope that my testing helps the EGit project. I think it would be benefical for the Eclipse eco-system if Eclipse has strong support for Git.
To get started with Git and EGit I created / updated the following tutorials:
Junes Challenge – Updating Tutorials to Eclipse 3.6
Keep my tutorials up with the Eclipse release flow is a time-consuming activity. As Eclipse 3.6 is approaching this month challenge is to update (some) of my Eclipse tutorials to Eclipse 3.6.
In my experience it is important to give users access a relatively actual information and by the user feedback I receive I can conclude that my tutorial are helpful.
I definitely will try to update Eclipse RCP Tutorial, Eclipse Commands Tutorial and Eclipse IDE Tutorial but hope to update more.