Netuality

Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel, both from Instantiations (the company which is developing and distributing SWT-Designer and Codepro, two very good payware Eclipse plugins) are preparing the book “Eclipse: Building Commercial Quality Plugins”, which should be published by Addison Wesley in 2Q 2004. Draft chapters are available at qualityeclipse.com.

Eclipse powered is a site by Ed Burnette, co-author of Eclipse in action at Manning. The new book will be targeted at building application architectured around RCP (Rich Client Platform). Unfortunately, the project is currently on hold (no reference about it on Manning either !), but the site has a nice, albeit short, collection of links to RCP resources. There also is an associated Sourceforge project with 4 example plugins, nothing very “rich-client” yet. Hope that's going to be published this year, because RCP is a very hot topic. Next week, I'll have my first RCP assignment – an integration feasibility study to establish whether we're going to use RCP as an alternative container for the supply chain&procurement modules of an ERP targeted to agro-industrial customers (the current container is a simple collection of tabs and a menu). It's going to be a fun week

“The project was complex-the USS Monitor had 47 different patentable inventions on board at launch. (Think you have integration problems?) When the pieces arrived at the shipyard from the foundries, they fit together poorly and much retrofitting had to be done. This affected the schedule and standards of quality. Thus, there was a rushed final integration effort and a couple of trial run retrofits. Although the ship's first battle in 1862 against the larger but less maneuverable ironclad CSS Virginia was successful (both sides declared victory-and wooden warships became a thing of the past), the USS Monitor sank a few months later on New Year's Eve while under tow in rough seas.”

Quote from a must-read article : Distributed Development Lessons Learned, ACM Queue vol. 1, no. 9 – December/January 2003-2004 by Michael Turnlund, Cisco Systems.

I have only recently descovered ACM Queue (via Miguel) and think that's a great resource. I have also found out that a new free, limited account is available on ACM Digital Library ? It's nicely complementing my IEEE Computer subscription (altough I never have to the time to read everything I want to, it's a warm, nice, fuzzy feeling to know that more and more articles are available ).

An interesting screenshot taken on the Inquirer site shows that GoogleAds might bring a lot of added value, from an informational point of view. Note that the original article wasn't mentioning the brand of the exploding phone.

PS Few days after this post, reloading the page article a few times, GoogleAds doesn't bring any Nokia reference, just neutral mobile phone shops. Good thing I've made a screenshot

Currently developing Eclipse plugins, I am constantly searching for things on the net. Have to admit that PDE documentation is very scarce as soon as you enter into the depths of Eclipse such as tight integration with the search mechanism or extending JDT. Searching this kind of things, absolutely by pure chance I have found two not very known Eclipse plugins.

UrbanSim is a “software-based simulation model for integrated planning and analysis of urban development”, and it's an Eclipse plugin ! Something like SimCity for geeks, without the fancy graphics. You can only log different urban evolution data and subsequently process it with your own tools if you want to. For real fun, computed data can be extracted from the database (yes, you have to install MySql) and viewed with a GIS tool such as ArcView. Not valuable per se for us Java developers but : - all the code is downloadable (GPLed). Some of algorithms might be worth a look. - UrbanSim includes a suite of acceptance tests derived from the FIT framework. AFAIK this is the first time FIT is used in a large open-source project. - (their own) continuous integration system Fireman is also visible on the net. Hey, where can I download that ? A presentation of UrbanSim is in the program of EclipseCon 2004.

From the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii, a plugin called Jupiter, which is described as “a code review plug-in tool for Eclipse to facilitate review process”. The plugin allows management of code annotations, storing “reviews” in an XML file, which can be shared with your team by CVS. This makes it much more than a code review tool, since it is quite possible to use the Jupiter “reviews” in order to share bug reports, enhancement requirements etc. What's interesting is that you can relate the reviews to specific Java code, this is a great feature; AFAIK missing from the mainstream issue trackers. A missing feature from Jupiter are issue metrics, but computing them from the XML files shouldn't be a difficult task. I see Jupiter more as a complement to traditional issue databases more than as a replacement, for different reasons: - is accessible only from Eclipse in Java development environment (would have been nice to be able to annotate other types of files) - in bigger teams, the XML files containing the reports are probably subject to frequent CVS conflicts - there is no review “history”, thus the project dynamics will not be available unless you process somehow all the CVS revisions of review files To conclude, Jupiter is somewhere between a smarter, enriched TODO with filters and a a poor man issue tracker. Worth a try. Also from CSDL, there is the Hackystat project which plays in a totally different league. Hackystat “provides automated support for collecting and analyzing metrics of the process and products of software development”. Technically, it's a server with a JSP frontoffice, aggregating data received via SOAP from various “sensors” installed in developer's tools : IDEs like Eclipse, build tools such as Ant, testing tools such as Junit. Something like a BigBrother approach for PSP, everything you do is tracked, measured and put in a chart or on a graph. I strongly suspect that this type of tools will soon be available commercially and used by management for performance evaluation of software engineers. NOT necessarily a good thing. Note that CSDL teams are using their own, inhouse-developed, tool for code coverage, JBlanket.

Well, if you look for Tapestry in Action on Amazon you'll find the older cover (different from the one on Manning) and the following useful advice :

- Customers interested in Tapestry in Action (In Action series) may also be interested in: “Browse through our fine selection of elegant wall hanging tapestries.” This one is understandable.

- Similar items in DVD : “Finding Nemo”. That one, is trickier.
- Look for similar books by subject: # Subjects > Cooking, Food & Wine > General, Kitchen & Housewares > Categories > Cookbooks > General.

Mmmm, tastyyyyy !

UPDATE: this is a very old article, if you’d like updated information about Eclipse please allow me to recommend the Eclipse IDE 3.7 book which includes a lot of useful configuration tips.

Today, a quick one.

If you work with a lot of projects, opening multiple Java files and performing big searches and refactorings from time to time, you'll notice that Eclipse becomes increasingly slower. This is somewhat similar with the infamous 'Windows rot'. Except, this time you have solutions other that complete reinstall.

Deleting “workspace/.metadata directory” is such a solution, but a violent one, since you lose all your settings and 'non-code' work. And while the settings can still be exported and reimported after the clean restart of Eclipse, there definitively is some data (such as the “Run” list) which has to be rebuilt from scratch. And if the list has tens of items, that's your precious worktime which is lost.

A nicer, less invasive solution is to delete only the resource history and the JDT caching. That means deleting all the content of the directory “workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.history” (but not the directory itself) as well as *.index files from “workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core” and “savedIndexNames.txt” from this same directory.

I've also learned that some hard Eclipse crashes as well as dubious plugin uninstalls (via directory deletions) migh completely bork the workspace, then Eclipse isn't even able to restart … again, the trick is to delete “workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml” and restart with default workbench. (see also one of my older posts).

Tested with Eclipse <=3.0M4 … YMMV