ESE '08: Will there be any organized runs this year?

I have been looking for some time now, but as I cannot find anything, I have to ask: Will there be any organized runs this year at Eclipse Summit Europe?

With all the good food and the many sessions where we all sit and listen, a little run or two would do us all good.

Meet Wayne Beaton in Denmark

Wayne - our most esteemed evangelist - will talk at a after-work meeting for eclipse.dk in Copenhagen on Thursday. The subject - apart from whatever you ask him - will be test driven development:

Test first development is a top-down process by which code is written starting with tests. Once tests have been created, the process changes to that of making the tests work by implementing the application code. In this short talk, we demonstrate how Eclipse support for JUnit facilitates test first development in the context of creating Java and Java EE applications, and plug-ins.

If you would like to participate, the meeting is taking place at ITU (Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 5.sal, 2300 København S) Thursday 16:00-18:30. Please sign up at eclipse.dk.

Shaping up for the Autumn :-)

Autumn is comming and with that many of us will be busy with training, mentoring and whatever we do for a living.

In order to get in shape for the Autumn, we participated in the largest fun run the DHL Relay in Copenhagen. 21000 teams with 5 runners each running 5 km in the middle of Copenhagen! The relay takes place over 5 days and just about every company in the Copenhagen area participates. Some with just one team and some with several hundred teams.

Most of the teams, ours included, combine the running with a good dinner afterwards.

The next runs are in 2 weeks (10 km) and in four weeks (13 km)...

And then we hope to be in shape for whatever the Autumns brings...

Annotating Eclipse Resources

In continuation of my last post, a small suggestion.



The Eclipse web site contains a rather large number of articles and resources, but it is rather difficult to see which version of Eclipse they pertain to. E.g. consider the article "Creating JFace Wizards". This is article is from 2002 and many readers will - at least initially - disregard it as being too old and likely not up-to-date. That is not the case, but how can you know that?

My sugestion is to add extra information to the article outline that lists the Eclipse versions for which this article is still relevant and if possible describe the level of "outdatedness" if case an article is not completely up-to-date.



In order to keep the extra information up-to-date, first the original author and then a volunteer will be asked to re-read the article and state the relevance for the new Eclipse release and possibly state the work needed to update the article. This way, we might also get a larger number of up-to-date sources on many of the more relevant Eclipse technologies which in turn will help out with the problems I outlines in my previous post.

Missing Books considered harmful

A very large percentage of of my customers are just starting to use Eclipse and Eclipse based technologies for their applications. So apart from having the basic 4-6 days training in RCP, EMF, GMF, etc they all have have one common and very important question: "Which books should we buy?"

And that question has become increasingly difficult to answer lately.

There are a number of absolutely good and noteworthy Eclipse books, but almost all of these are not up-to-date and that can be a major problem for people that need a good reference guide and best practices guide to Eclipse.

Almost all of the books on Eclipse are one or two versions behind the current baseline and that means the readers will not be able to take advantage of the new and improved stuff. And consequently they are rather frustrated when the only source to the new functionality is... the source.

Yes, I do know that many of the books in question are under revision and expected to be here any time soon, but even these revisions are delayed - in some cases as long as a year. And yes, I do know that the authors of technical books do not get rich from their work, so they have little incentive to update their books.


But there must be something that can be done about this. Just consider the number of books that are marketed by Microsoft on their many technologies and consider which role these books play in many developers life.
Before you start: yes, most of Microsofts software is closed source and consequently you need the books... but why should you have to read though 8-12 millions lines of code to understand just what the new and much improved APIs do?

I would suggest that we add a new criteria before an incubator project can graduate: there must be a book or at least a number of authoritative articles on the project. And for each new major release, there must be an official update of these...

Whether the foundation should be part of this work or not, I don't know. I can easily see arguments for both...

Implementing screen flows

On EclipseCon '08 I had a presentation named Lessons Learned from an Enterprise RCP Application. As said then, one of the major differences between most Eclipse IDEs and many enterprise applications is the way the performed tasks are controlled by the end-users:

• In IDEs - and many more technical RCP applications - most task is controlled by creativity. E.g. you get a task - create this or change that - and then it is more or less up to you how you want to solve it. You might have a number of large-scope processes - like you have to check in your work and change the state of issue reports - but nothing on the smaller scale.
• In many enterprise RCP application most tasks are controlled by processes. E.g. you have an exact description of how to perform most tasks - like create new account or change the payment plan. Processes are here centered on the smaller scale as well on the larger scale - like in which sequence data must be entered when making a new credit agreement.

Out of the box Eclipse RCP supports wizards as the primary type of processes engine. In the default implementation, wizards have one major limitations compared with what you would like to see in many enterprise applications: they are modal and thus you can only have one active process at any one time.

That does not match well with many enterprise applications where the user must be able to 1) service phone calls in the middle of an on-going task and 2) alternate between a number of tasks...

The current wizard interface has a number of other problems as well:

• The interface for a wizard page (IWizardPage) assumes that a page cannot be "stale" compared with the model - which of cause is fine as long as wizards are modal... Note that this is actually solved in another similar interfaces used in the Forms UI API (IFormPart).
• The interface for a wizard page also makes the different pages aware of the previous and next pages as well as the actual control of the page which is a little peculiar when doing screen flows, where you might want a high degree of reuse of pages between processes.
• The use of WizardPage.setControl() seems to be one of the major sources of problems when developing pages - people just forget :-(

Of cause the wizard implementation has one major point that speaks for it: the current UI design tools - like SWT Designer - understands wizard pages, but not whatever we invent.

Until now we have implemented the needed processes as needed, but now are going to implement a rather large number of processes - of which many will be quite similar, so we want to implement some framework to ease the work and to make the result more maintainable.

The question is now: what would you do here? Implement a new wizard viewer in a view that can show multiple concurrent wiards or implement a new (simplified) flow interface that matches the requirements exactly? For those of you that have implemented RCP applications already, what have you done in these?

Hosting text editors in views - is it possible

As some of you might have noticed from past postings, I normally prefer to use only views in RCP application and no editors at all...

One of my new customers already have a text editor (based on TextEditor) as an Eclipse IDE extension they want to bring over to a new RCP application. One of the questions, we now have to assert is whether to use editors in the RCP application in question or try to redo the editor as a view.

But, before we start on this work, I just wanted to hear if anybody out these has tried to do this before and have a qualified meaning about the issues involved. Is it at all possible? Or is it just a lot of work?

We understand that the real work is in how to use SourceViewer and friends, and that seems to be doable in a view, but...

If it turns out to be very difficult to implement editors in view, we might just dedicate a speciel perspective for this, but the best solution probably would be to use views only.

View versus Editor in RCP - a different opinion

In a current blog thread David Orme writes, you should use editors in RCP applications when you need life-cycle management...

I very strongly disagree with this. For me the important statement by David is

The only real difference between a view and an editor is that there is exactly 1 editor area and once visible, it is always visible even if no editors are open.

The current implementation for editors does not allow you to mix editors and views in one stack (or folder), which can be a serious problem in many applications. E.g. consider the banking application where you use a perspective to show a lot of information about a specific customer. In a few cases you want to edit parts of this information...

Would you then use an editor for this? What would you put in the editor area when you don't need to edit any customer data?

The basic problem here is - in my opinion - that the editor area is a serous waste of screen estate when editors are not needed.

You can find a presentation on this from EclipseCon '08.