You’ve definitely heard about
Xtext, the famous text modeling framework,
community award winner . We are all looking forward to the new project management wonder: the
release of Helios, upcoming on June the 23rd, which will include Xtext 1.0.0. In this article, I want do describe some aspects of integration of Xtext-based languages into IDE.
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Archive for the ‘eclipse’ Category
Extending Xtext Build Participants
Launching Eclipse RCP via Java Web Start
The Eclipse RCP became a prominent platform for building client software. One of the delivery mechanisms supported by Eclipse RCP is Sun’s Java Web Start (JWS). Since Galileo Edition some changes has been introduced in the platform. This article provides some hints for creation of the RCP delivered by Java Web Start.
Packaging
In order to package the RCP I suggest to use feature-based products as described in a previous article. Following it, you should have a top-level plug-in (also refered as product-defining plug-in) and top-level feature, which is called “wrap”-feature in the context of the Java Web Start.
Exporting the product
Before you start with Java Web Start (JWS), export the product and make sure it starts as a standalone application. In doing so, you have to ensure that your references to the plug-ins are correct. One of the way of doing it is to hit the Validate button in the top left of the product editor. 
If the validation is successful, try to export the product. The PDE builder will run and create a distribution. The errors of the compiler/builder/assembler, if any, are reported to files zipped to the logs.zip file in the distribution directory.
Eclipse DemoCamp Hamburg | November 2009
An event of
annual series of Eclipse Demo Camps is taking place in Hamburg again. The event was planned in November, but takes actually place in December. As usually
Peter and
Martinare responsible for the organization. To make it short:
- What: Eclipse DemoCamp November 2009
- Where: Hotel East, Hamburg ( Simon-von-Utrecht-Str. 31, 20359 Hamburg, Germany)
- When: December 4th 2009, 18:30-22:00 (official part)
If you want to attend, make sure you find a minute to write you name down in EclipseWiki. I suppose these kind of events is well-known. If you never heard of that – look at the interesting topics and the attendee list of more than one hundred people. You will have the opportunity to listen to the talks, to speak with interesting people and get some news from Eclipse Commiters and Users. In the end you usually get some food and bevereges, to make the atmosphere a little more relaxed. If you never been there it is worth to visit…
EWiTa and ESE 2009
Even if some time has passed since the events EWiTa 2009 and Eclipse Summit Europe 2009, I would like to share my impressions, since I took part in both events…
EWiTa 2009
EWiTa 2009 stands for Elmshorner Wirtschaftsinfromatiktag, that is German for “Elmshorn Business Information Systems Day”. The event has been organized by Frank Zimmermann, of
Nordakademie – a private university in Northern Germany. Even if the event is not an official sequel of the
MDSD Today, there were many similarities. The event had two tracks: the process modeling track and the MDSD track. After an excellent keynote from Mathias Weske about the importance of collaboration during the process of (business) modeling I stayed in the business track to listen to the Andrea Grass (
oose GmbH) on the combination of UML and BPMN 2.0. To say the truth, I’m not a big fan of this approach, especially, because the conceptual mismatch of modeling of business behavior and technical behavior. After a coffee break I enjoyed an excellent talk of
itemis), reporting about the success story of xText in a big project of Deutsche Börse AG (German Stock Exchange).
After a small lunch, I was listening to two Arcando consultants reporting about their eTicketing project. The strange thing about this talk was that they just made some ads on a standard Microsoft product. After this, I enjoyed an interesting talk on business modeling based on CobIT process. Finally, I switched the track again to MDSD and listend to the an interesting usage of MDSD techniques for generation of DynPro and ABAP code.
In general I enjoyed the event. I think the MDSD track was a little more technical, but the combination was good.
Eclipse Summit Europe 2009
The Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 (ESE 2009) took place on October 27-29 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, it is the European complement to the EclipseCon in the US. In contrast to the spring event in Santa Clara, CA, the ESE is an autumn event in a beautiful baroque town near Stuttgart. The event lasted three days and is a must for Eclipse-related technology people. As usual, the venue was great, the keynotes excellent and the talks interesting. And of course it was the place to meet the committers, evangelists, see them in action, talk to them and discuss the future directions.
Symposium Day
The first day is an arrival day. People arrive during the day, some of them are already there. I was visiting the Modeling Track the whole day and had much fun with Ed Merks, Eike Stepper and Thomas Schindl in the morning. Later, in the Modeling Symposium, Eike showed the eDine RCP based on CDO, UBS envisioned the modeling tool pipeline and so on, and so on. About 10 people showed different technologies on and about modeling. Intersting, unstructured and relaxed. And of course, the first evening is the opportunity to speak with all the Eclipse VIPs and drink a cold beer.
First Day
The main conference day was Wednesday and it started with a great keynote on functional programming held by Don Syme, the father of F#. Suprisingly, the talk was about F#. For some of us, there was not enough functional beauty exposed in the talk, so I scheduled a private session with Don and he told
Markus Voelter,
Heiko Behrens and
me about some interesting F# features.
I took part in the How about I/O session on JPicus. A very interesting tool for tracking I/O problems in Java programs developed by SAP. The Climb The Tower of Babel was about the Eclipse translation project. Intersting is the runtime editor allowing you to translate you runnig application. After a delicios lunch, I enjoyed two modeling talks: Xtext and EMF Query. The itemis team introduced some really new features, which make Xtext in my oppinion to a unique technology. Just to mention few of them: white-space aware parsing, usage of scopes and qualified names, usage of index (construted by a builder) in your own language, separation of markers and annotations in the editor, integration of the generator on-save, declarative quick-fix in your DSL, strings with special meaning, references to java types, and much more… The EMF Query is a project developed by the SAP team, that leverages the index by a query language. The language is a SQL-like DSL for querying the EMF-based models. The infrastructure is very intersting and allows complex scenarios with multiple model providers – very technical, and I believe, very interesting project.
Second Day
After the keynote on the importance of software ecosystems and a deep economical analysis of Eclipse ecosystem, I switched off the track to be able to prepare
my talk. I was reporting about the IDE for TLA+ which I was building the last nine month at Microsoft Research, and which will be
available soon. The main emphasis of the talk, was not the demo of the IDE, but the exchange of experiences on building one. Especially, I focused on the possible pitfalls and conceptual mismatches of IDEs depending on the integrated language. The slides will be available soon.
At the end, I enjoyed the event very much. I even liked it more than EclipseCon. Modeling still seems to be the most interesting part of Eclipse ecosystem. Technologies like Xtext and CDO gain maturity, new technolgoes like EMF Query are being developed. It was nice to see the people again… As usual, some pictures:
Eclipse CNF: Navigator Content Extensions
Abstract
After
providing the basic example of how the Eclipse Common Navigator Framework (CNF) can be used to display custom content, this article focuses on the main feature of the CNF – the contribution of content to the same navigator by several independent plug-ins. First of all, I will explain some minor changes introduced to the CNF in the Gallileo Edition, then I will focus on the content itself and finally provide an overview of how the action contributions can be provided. In the end of the post, some ideas on control of dynamic content are explained.
Gallileo Changes
There are two noticeable changes in the CNF that have been added with Eclipse Galileo. The return type of the method (more…)
Passing Data between Plug-ins
Abstract
The Eclipse Platform provides a very rich API for the development and configuration of plug-ins and RCPs. It does this in two ways: by providing the corresponding classes and interfaces or by using the extension point mechanism. During the development the question arises, how to develop own extension points and how those plug-in interfaces look like. This article summarizes some of my experiences with developing plug-ins extension points.
Introduction
The extensive use of extension points is the standard approach during the development of own plug-ins and Eclipse-based applications. Especially, in the 3.x branch, the Eclipse Developers introduced tons of new extension points, primarily for the user interface, moving towards the declarative definition of the UI. Even if the the topic of the definition of extension points is covered in several books and articles, it is a bit challenging to come up with a clean extension point design for a particular scenarios, especially for beginners. This has to do with the specific way, how the Eclipse platform handles extensions.
In order to have a concrete scenario, lets assume that a small RCP application consisting of two plug-ins is being developed. The application prints out the time every ten seconds. One plug-in is responsible for the functionality of the time generation (lets call it the Core plug-in) and another, for the presentation of the results of the first one (lets call it UI plug-in). The separation of code in UI and non-UI plug-ins is a common practice and the standard question is, how to to pass data between the two. In general we assume, that the UI plug-in depends on the Core plug-in.
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Packaging Eclipse-based RCP for the use in enterprise context
Abstract
Using Eclipse-based rich-clients as stand-alone applications is discussed in many books and articles. In the context of enterprise systems, the software development adopted several paradigms to improve the quality of the overall architecture. This short article describes some issues in packaging the application for using it in the context of enterprise systems.
Architectural Assumptions
Designing enterprise architectures is a standard discipline for IT-consulting companies or freelancers involved in software development. Maybe one of the main characteristics of enterprise architectures is the framework-driven approach of software creation. Thus, the software has to comply certain rules and standards adopted inside the enterprise. In order to simplify such constrained development process, it is common to use an in-house software framework, which enforces the compliance of the enterprise-internal standards and acts as glue between different technologies adopted as parts of the enterprise architecture.
Using such frameworks has major implications for the software development in general, and especially for the rich client development. The design issues are summarized in the next section.
Usaging an Enterprise Framework
The major goal of the enterprise in-house framework is to simplify the process of software systems development and to enforce standardization among the software systems. This usually includes the following aspects:
- Domain-specific component framework
- Methods for master data management
- Infrastructure services: authentication, authorization, communication, security, printing, reporting
- Application skeletons and launchers
The more unification and standardization is included inside the framework, the easier it is for a software developer to concentrate on the particular business task and the easier is the maintenance of the software system.
From the previous list, the most interesting part related to RCP packaging and deployment is the existence of the application skeletons and launchers. So, when launching an application, the framework libraries are loaded and executed first and pass the control to the application-specific modules. The advantage of this approach is that infrastructure services can be loaded first, which can be developed and shared among different applications.
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Eclipse renews itself: Galileo has arrived!
Finally, another annual release of Eclipse has arrived: version 3.5 aka Galileo.
Galileo is the release of Eclipse IDE synchronized with packets tuned for the Galileo release. Eclipse IDE has moved on from being a sole and mere development environment to being a rich architecture. Often, this is not visible to the novice user.
Galileo, or the JDT (Java Development Tools) to be more precisely, does not surprise with a load of stunning new features, instead, its a solid continuation of improvements. Concerning the JDT part, it has lost its pace of former days. But Eclipse JDT still is the reliable friend at your side, helping you code. This is a good thing, since Eclipse has been the IDE of choice for many, many Java programmers for a lot of years now and has grown to something like a “standard”. Its usability and reliability are well known and especially the first part has been constantly improved.
Galileo now draws its innovative power from the huge amount of different projects which were developed for it. The amount of tools for modeling is impressive. However it is not surprising, since modeling has become a sport in the past month. Consequently, it is bare logic to improve the tooling capabilities and quality. Galileo is following this path, not only because of Eclipse, but with what is available for it.
Code is poetry!
Eclipse DemoCamp Galileo Hamburg
As announced in a
previous post the Eclipse Demo Camp Hamburg – Galileo Edition took place in the East Hotel in Hamburg. Organized by
Peter and
Martin, the event was again an interesting meeting with Eclipse-interested people in a wonderful location. Five presenters introduced Eclipse and OSGi-related topics.
Moritz Eysholdt reported about the
(Meta)Model Evolutions, he was focusing on during his masters thesis. The interesting part of his solution are two Xtext DSLs for description of the Metamodel changes (EPatch) and model migration algorithms (MetaPatch).
Heiko Behrens gave a funny and really good introduction of Xtext and DSLs for not Xtext developers. I really like his examples: these are simple and understanding for everyone. Great job!
Marco Mosconi showed some
ObjectTeams (black) magic. A
very intersting technology using aspect-oriented programming for type-safe framework modifications. Seem to be pretty advanced technology with interesting tooling.
Markus Alexander Kuppe had a talk on ECF and
RFC 119 and gave some sneak preview of the upcomming features. Finally, I had a short talk on Common Navigator Framework, basically explaining the
article posted here and something I documented for Galileo. Here are some visual impressions:
my FlickR set and
Peter’s.
Eclipse Common Navigator Framework
Abstract
This article describes some efforts to use the Common Navigator Framework (CNF). In doing so it incorporates the information already covered in different articles, but also focuses on the specific use case of providing a view of something completely unrelated to the platform resources. So the aim is not to add some content to the “Project Explorer” which is an example of resource-oriented CNF usage, but to provide a view on a completely own data model.
Introduction
A very common UI element to represent data is a tree view. In SWT this UI element is implemented using the Tree widget. Following the MVC design pattern in the TreeViewer, JFace simplifies the usage of the Tree widget by delegating the task of content adoption to the ContentProvider and the label production to the LabelProvider (and using Sorters and Filters for sorting and filtering). Still for a single representation one has to construct a viewer and configure it with a corresponding Label- and ContentProvider. Further code reduction can be achieved by the use of WorkbenchContentProvider and WorkbenchLabelProvider if the elements can be made adaptable (implement IAdaptable interface and making them first-class workbench citizens). This approach is helpful, if the elements has to be displayed in several different viewers (e.G. Table). Finally, the Common Navigator Framework (CNF) is a facility provided by the Eclipse Platform which allows the usage of multiple Label- and ContentProvider on the same view. The providers are activated and used dynamically and can be configured declarative or programmatically. The advantage of CNF approach is the ability to combine elements in one view which have different origins(e.G. contributed by different plugins). CNF is used in Eclipse IDE: e.G. “ProjectExplorer” and “CVS Synchrnoize” are both instances of the CNF.
The usage of the CNF in your own application for purposes of representation of resource-based (and usually file-based) content is discussed in articles of Micael Elder in detail. The main idea is to instantiate the view, declare the default content and UI interface and make some additions where needed. This post has a different aim: we start from scratch and represent completely resource unrelated content. Before diving in the implementation details, some overview is provided.
UI Overview
There are many things which can be configured by the usage of CNF and it is beyond the scope of this post to cover all of them. Still there are several things to understand before the actual code can be written. The user interacts with a View which shows the data elements. Which elements are shown is configured using the navigation content extensions. Shown elements can be filtered with Filters and sorted using Sorters on behalf of the user. There are some predefined actions and their positions in the UI and corresponding extension points to contribute to. 
. The actions for Working sets, Customize View, Link with editor belong to this category. The user can also right-click on particular element in the tree and sees a popup-menu. This menu is configured based on the content element and can be (is) contributed by several plugins. The action contribution is also covered in the article series from
Michael Elder.
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