Monthly Archives: February 2012

Eclipse 4 is now a full dependency injection container with @Creatable

Eclipse,

If you want to get your own Java objects injected into a model elements just annotated them with @Creatable. If you then tell Eclipse that you need an instance of the your class it will generate it for you.

For example, lets say you have the following domain model.

@Creatable
class Todo {
 @Inject
 public Todo(Dependent depend, YourOSGiService service) {
     // placeholder
 }
}

@Creatable
class Dependent {
 public Dependent() {
 // placeholder
 }
}

Assuming that you have defined the required OSGi service, you can get an instance of your Todo data model injected in a Part. 

// Field Injection
@Inject Todo todo

Pretty cool, I think. For details check out the Bug report.

To use this please use one of the recent integration builds. Eclipse 4.2M5 does not yet contain the feature.

I added this also to Eclipse 4 Tutorial. It is also included in my Eclipse 4 RCP training.

vogella.de gets a motto – “Because knowledge feels like magic”

vogella

Every company has a motto which should describe its primary purpose. Google has the “Don’t be evil” motto, Nike has “Just do it”, IBM has to my knowledge “Think” as motto and Apples has “Think Different”.

I personally like to acquire and distribute knowledge. Knowledge and certain skills can feel very impressive, I still remember that programming felt a bit like magic to me then I started with it approx. 25 years ago.

The primary purpose of vogella.de is to distribute knowledge and to enable others to do cool things with technology.

After some thinking I therefore decided that the motto of vogella.de should be: “Because knowledge feels like magic“.

Let me know what you think.

Eclipse 4 RCP training available

Eclipse,

A few weeks ago I heard from Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Day At Googleplex 2011 that Eclipse 4.2 will be the basis for the Juno release and Eclipse 3.8 will be the last Eclipse 3.x release.

I already gave two full Eclipse 4 trainings and I’m very enthusiastic about the new capabilities, the consistent API and the flexibility of the programming model. It also appears to me that it is much easier to learn for the attendees of the training, due to the consistent API.

The Eclipse 4.2 M5 release is already very stable (which was the basis for my trainings) and lots of new stuff will be available in the Eclipse 4.2 M6 release.

Based on these facts, I decided that it is time to upgrade my Eclipse RCP training to the programming model of Eclipse 4.2.

An updated (English) agenda can be found here:

Eclipse 4 RCP training

This is not only a delta training but a complete introduction into the Eclipse 4 RCP platform also covering SWT, JFace, OSGi modularity, OSGi services and more. I also cover the compatibility layer which allows you to migrate your Eclipse 3.x application to Eclipse 4.2. In this training a complete application will be developed from ground up.

The training material is in English, if you are looking to get an Eclipse 4 RCP training outside Germany feel free to contact me.

Batch converting LibreOffice documents into pdf

Other

LibreOffice has a nice command line interface which allows to convert documents into pdf.

For example to convert foo.odt document into foo.pdf use:

soffice -nologo -invisible-convert-to pdf foo.odt

Use the -outdir parameter to specify the output directory

soffice -nologo -invisible-convert-to pdf -outdir ./pdf foo.odt

Or to convert all documents from a directory use:

soffice -invisible -nologo -convert-to pdf *.odp

Android StrictMode – NetworkOnMainThreadException

Android, , ,

I have writen about StrictMode before.

In case you have not noticed; StrictMode for network access results in a fatal error as for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) or later, unless your app is targeting an API version before Honeycomb.

The right way of solving this is to use Android AsyncTask for network access.

The lazy way of handling this is to turn the check of:

StrictMode.ThreadPolicy policy = new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder().permitAll().build();
StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(policy);

For my Android Network tutorial I use the lazy way because I don’t want to force the reader to learn both things at the same time.

But I recommend you learn Android Background Processing.

I hope this helps.

WindowBuilder Support for Eclipse 4 Parts in Juno

Eclipse,

I’m happy to see that WindowBuilder will support Eclipse 4 in the Eclipse Juno release. See Bug Report for details.

WindowBuilder is a great efficiency tool for creating user interfaces and he adaption of Eclipse 4 will be much easier for companies by having such a great tooling available for Eclipse 4 based applications.

Eclipse 4 is getting really stable and is very powerful. Last week I trained 16 developers in Eclipse 4 based on the M5 milestone. While we had a few issues in this training, I was very much impressed how stable the platform already is. All discovered issues have been filled, so I expect that M6 will be rock stable.

Also by using the consistent programming model, it was much easier to explain the concepts. No more remembering how to get a Shell from the different places of the application.

I suggest that people really take a peek. I reworked my Eclipse 4 tutorial based on the training, so you should be able to get an easy start.

Eclipse gets sexy again – new Splashscreen

Eclipse,

In case you missed it, Eclipse 4.2 has a new Spashscreen.

I really like it (maybe the Eclipse graphic could be a little lower to feel more centered but otherwise it is great).

The details are in the Bug report:

Bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=341645

You can download the latest integration build of Eclipse 4.2 and get this new Splashscreen. See Eclipse 4 Tutorial for the details of installing Eclipse 4.

These are good times for Eclipse 4; the Splash Screen is what every IDE user will see, almost every day. Its great that it looks modern and attractive.

Avoiding Git Merge Commits with branch.branchname.rebase = true

Other

If you have local changes in your Git repo and pull in new changes from your remote repository, Git will per default create a merge commit for the pulled changes. This can clutter your history with unnecessary commits.

To rebase your local changes on top of the pulled changes, you can use:

git pull --rebase

To activate this for all new branches.

git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always

To update existing branches in your Git repo use the command:

git config branch.<name>.rebase true

Not everyone likes rebase. Here is a little summary why Linus Torvalds doesn’t like rebasing: http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_Management.