Netuality

Since September 17 (three long days and nobody broke the silence ?) the 3.0.1 maintenance release of Eclipse is available for download. There is a respectable list of bugfixes and the same announcement contains the links to latest versions for core plugins such as GEF, EMF, CDT and (surprise, surprise ?) UML2 (v1.0.1).

Yes, you can increment your SDK version via Eclipse update, but it doesn't work for GEF and EMF, so it's time to fire up those download managers …

PS: Well it seems that the automatic upgrade does work for GEF and EMF, if they're correctly installed, with features & all.

“More and more pressure is on Microsoft to rush Longhorn. Apparently, a number of Microsoft licensees will get some sort of massive refund if the product isn't delivered in 2006, and the word on the street is that the code keeps breaking. My guess is that at the last minute the company will kludge together a workable system missing a lot of features.”

John C. Dvorak, Now What Do We Do? Dept. 13 July 2004

“In order to make this date (of 2006), we've had to simplify some things, to stagger it. One of the things we're staggering is the Windows storage work,” Jim Allchin, Microsoft's vice president in charge of Windows development, said in an interview with CNET News.com

CNET News.com Microsoft revamps its plans for Longhorn August 27, 2004

While the REST API is mentioned in the Top 10 Reasons to use Jira, I can hardly see any reference to such an external API in the documentation (I mean, besides XML-RPC and upcoming SOAP support) and even Google can't clear the issue. But I can confirm you, it is possible to fully(?) automate Jira using HTTP requests.

Recently, I was asked to programatically login a user into Jira and open a browser with the results of an advanced search. This is part of a really slick integration between one of my employer's products and a JIRA server – mainly helping our testers to avoid bug duplication and also providing insightful statistics for QA dept.

I've started doing it the hard way, trying to obtain and pass JSESSIONID and other useless stuff between my application and the browser, until I realized that Jira can be fully controlled through HTTP in a REST-like manner. Let me explain. Normally, if you are not logged into Jira and launch a browser with a carefully crafted search request (well, you know how to reverse enginner POSTs into GETs don't you ?) – then a graceful invitation to log in is everything you'll ever obtain. But, if you add at the end of your request “&os_username=” + USER + “&os_password=”+ PASS bang ! not only you obtain the desired search results, but you are automagically logged into Jira for the rest of the browsing session. Yes, yes yes : here I come, integration ! A couple of hours later, I am able to programatically insert bug reports, extract bug details, compute statistics and open customized advanced searches.

To quote a classic : Jira ! Jira ! Jira !. Docs would be nice, though.

PS I'm testing this on a Jira Professional 2.6.1-#65. YMMV.

This is the summary of a nice thread spotted on eclipse.platform.rcp. The initial question was I am constantly having to deal with resistance from my developers, which mostly boils down to resistance to SWT, and hesitance from peers in the company. There are compelling arguments to counter nearly every criticism that I've encounted. However, I'm having difficulty with one question, has anyone else based a non-IDE product on Eclipse?. A few answers later, boy do we have some nice eye candy to show !

	The XMF Mosaic Development Environment from Xantium provides “platform for engineering semantically rich languages and tools” (errr, whatever this means, just looks nice).
	Eclipse Trader is not quite a fully-fledged app, but a set of plugins for the Eclipse platform, dedicated to the building of an online stock trading system. This is an open-sourced, very recent project, with interesting features such as charts built with data extracted from Yahoo! Finance.
	EPIC from Incremental stands for a nice looking management software for the ship repair industry. You'll spot some gorgeous Eclipse Forms in the screenshots !

Recently, doing some SWT research, I've stumbled over a few open-sourced apps, not very popular but still interesting to disect. Thought you'd like me to share, so:

	Quezen is an open source administration utility for the OpenJMS messaging system and is an implementation of the OpenJMS 0.7.6.1 Administration API.
	Freeciv-swt is a Freeciv client using SWT widgets, port of the jfreeciv client. It's a rather corny app, using SWT2 as far as I can tell, but exhibiting interesting features, so worth a look.
	Argonaute (French) is a file manager developed by a team of 6 students from Université de Marne-la-Vallée. A bit slow on big filesystems (such as mine) but it has autocompletion, display filters and drag and drop between multiple instances.

Enjoy …

NB: Here's my older post about SWT apps …