The Galileo Edition of Eclipse is already in the pipeline and the community is happy to celebrate this with a series of events. In Hamburg we do it in two ways – there are Eclipse DemoCamps and Eclipse Stammtisch. This time Peter and Martin managed to put both events together. To make it short:

• What: Eclipse DemoCamp + Eclipse Stammtisch
• Where: Hotel East, Hamburg ( Simon-von-Utrecht-Str. 31, 20359 Hamburg, Germany)
• When: May 25th 2009, 18:00-21:00 (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 – I can only recomend to take part. 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. The location is a very descend place with wonderfull flair. If you never be there it is worth to visit…

Posted in announce | 4 Comments »

I found strange problem running wscompile (from Sun’s Java Web Service Developer Pack 1.6) inside Ganymede (Eclipse Version 3.4.1). The run of the wscompile Ant task produce a problem. The build script execution freezes on the wscompile task. It prints the following message on console but then nothing happens.

[wscompile] wscompile ...\env\java\1.4.2_03\jre\bin\classpath-classpath D:\workspaces\general\lib\bla.bo-0.0.1.jar; ... D:\workspaces\general\lib\... jar.0.5.5

In this line, the classpath of wscompile is printed.

The build script uses configured Apache Ant in version 1.6.5. I tried to start it with Java in versions 1.4.2 und 1.6.0.10. Both works in Europa (Eclipse 3.3.x) but don’t work in Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4.x), except for the first run. It seems that Ganymede provides a different handling for Ant scripts. Every first start of an Ant build script produces new “External Tool Configuration” (if not already there). If this configuration already exists, wscompile task doesn’t work!

This means my build script with wscompile task works only once, every first time after deleting the “External Tool Configuration”. I could live with that if I wouldn’t need that configuration. But I need that configuration to use different java version that is the workspace default.

Do anyone know how to fix that?
Here is my task definiton.

<taskdef name="wscompile"
		classname="com.sun.xml.rpc.tools.ant.Wscompile"
		classpathref="class.path.jwsdp"
		/>

and also task usage in the script

<wscompile fork="true" import="true" base="java/class" sourceBase="java/generated" verbose="true" features="documentliteral, wsi, searchschema, serializeinterfaces, explicitcontext" mapping="java/generated/META-INF/jaxrpc-mapping.xml" config="metadata/wsdl-config.xml" xSerializable="true">
	<classpath>
		<path refid="class.path.local" />
		<path refid="class.path.ant" />
		<pathelement path="${java.class.path}" />
	</classpath>
</wscompile>

Comments are welcome.

Posted in eclipse, enterprise systems, java, tools | 1 Comment »

Eclipse RCP by default promotes the usage of a single application window with multiple views and editors inside. This default can be changed to multi-windowed application. The platform API offers several methods to operate with multiple application windows:

package org.eclipse.ui;
...
public interface IWorkbench ...
{
/**
* Retrieves the number of opened windows
*/
public int getWorkbenchWindowCount();
/**
* Retrieves the array of opened windows
*/
public IWorkbenchWindow[] getWorkbenchWindows();
/**
* Openes a new window with given perspective
*/
public IWorkbenchWindow openWorkbenchWindow(String perspectiveId,
IAdaptable input) throws WorkbenchException;
/**
* Performs a perspective switch in a given window
*/
public IWorkbenchPage showPerspective(String perspectiveId,
IWorkbenchWindow window, IAdaptable input)
throws WorkbenchException;
...

}

Using this API, opening of new windows seems simple. For example one could define a perspective, that is always opens in a new window.

Closing windows is generally performed by calling close method on the IWorkbenchWindow instance.

package org.eclipse.ui;
...
public interface IWorkbenchWindow ...
{
  /**
   * Closes the window
   */
  public boolean close();
}

Unfortunaly, there is no elegant way to find out which window are you in. A workaround which uses Eclipse internal API works fine for WorkbenchWindow, which is a standard platform implementation of the IWorkbenchWindow interface.

/**
 * Determines if the window is a root window
 * @param window a window to be checked
 * @return true, if the window is considered to be a root window
 */
public static int getWindowId(IWorkbenchWindow window)
{
// HACK: note this could change in future
  if (window != null && window instanceof WorkbenchWindow))
  {
    return ((WorkbenchWindow)window).getNumber();
  }
  return -1;
}

The initial application window gets the id 1. The lookup in the implementation reveals that the internal method finds the smalles unused positive number and assigns it to the newly opened window. If you do not want to rely on this algorithm, just hash the newly created windows by they ids.

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On the 10th of November it was time again: an Eclipse Demo Camp took place in the East Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. This time, the Demo Camp was sponsored by Itemis, it-agile, froglic and of course the Eclipse Foundation. The organisators of the evening were Peter Friese (Itemis) and Martin Lippert (it-agile) who intruduced the presenters.

Harald Wellmann of Innovative Systems GmbH (Harman/Becker Automotive Systems) talked about “Europe on a Disk – Geoprocessing for Car Navigation Systems”. He talked about their usage of Eclipse and OSGi to build the map compiler on top of these and explained different benefits and drawbacks in using this technology. Additionally, he talked about Jump and uDig which is used for displaying maps in the Eclipse Map Processing Toolkit. Apart from the technical point of view, the talk gave an interesting little insight how the maps for our beloved navigational systems are created.

The second talk was given by Gerd Wütherich ( independant consultant) and was about “Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi Service Platforms”. He demostrated how to use Spring in order to harness the power of OSGis dynamic Java lifecycle in enterprise applications. While presenting he showed some small demos. In his order service example, two persistence services were available and one went “offline”, so the other one jumped in to take over. Once the second service went down too, the application was waiting (with a timeout) until some persistence service was available. As a “a world in a nutshell” this was a great demo of how to use dynamic modules.

After the second talk was a little break with italian food. (Which I did not try, so I will not comment on it, but it looked delicious.)

Miguel Garcia ( TUHH) and Rakesh Prithiviraj were talking about “Rethinking the Architecture of Java ORM in terms of LINQ”. This session basically covered a “what we (Java developers) could learn from .NET” features. As far as I understood, LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) is a query which is translated to a query for a specific natural datasource. Visualö Studio seems to provide good support for these kind of queries including content assist. Java on the other hand seems to struggle to provide as good support. The talk covered ideas of how to get at least close, if not catch up. I honestly do not understand, why such a innovative mechanism as LINQ was not introduced in Java much earlier? ( Slides of the two)

The last talk was given by Stephan Herrmann ( TU Berlin) discussed “Plugin reuse and adaptation with Object Teams: Don’t settle for a compromise!”. This was basically an intruduction to Object Teams, a language extension to Java, which was developed over the past seven-eight years at the TU Berlin. This extension does not only cover the fundamental aspects but supports the complete Eclipse tool support: content assist, debugger and finally, compiler. Object Teams provides something, which Stephan explained as inheritence on object level (instead on on the class level). It provides the ability to modify objects (especially class instances, not classes!) with additional behavior. So, it is possible to adapt classes to change their runtime behavior with so-called Role Classes. On method level, the roles can be applied in a call-in or call-out fashion, depending on when they have to be invoked. From the point of view of software engineering and language design this was a very interesting talk. (For more information refer to ObjectTeams, Slides are online at Slides).

And after the end of this talk, 23:00h had passed (we started at 19:00 o’clock). However, seeing many familiar faces and having a pleasant conversation, together with great presentations made it worth staying up late.

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On October 15th to 17th the Workshop on MDSD Today 2008 took place in the Nordakademie Elmshorn near Hamburg. This workshop was actually the sequel to two different workshops which were led by Frank Zimmermann (Nordakademie) and Simon Zambrovski (TUHH) the year before. For this years event, Peter Friese (Itemis) from Itemis joined the two for organizing the Workshop.

The workshop was divided into three parts: Day 1: Management Day, Day 2: Professional Day (Modeling Projects and Tutorials) and Day 3: Professional Day (Generator Tutorials). (See also MDSD08).

The first day was dominated by excellent key-note speeches given by the EMF lead Ed Merks Ph.D. and SAPs Dr. Axel Uhl. Ed was talking about misconceptions in understanding and applying model driven techniques. Axel on the other hand talked about the challenges that still lay on our way and need to be overcome. He discussed for example the different benefits and drawbacks of using different sorts of DSL (e.g. non-textual / textual) with respect to storing them in repositories, merging and refactoring (i.e. general tool-support). Birger Garbe and Stefan Reichert (both Lufthansa Systems consultants) talked about their experiences in applying MDSD in the field. Chances and riscs were explained and how they managed to overcome those riscs. Thomas Stahl of b+m Informatik gave a talk about how MDSD, BPM and SOA fit together, unfortunately he couldn’t give is planned speech “Experiences of 10 years of MDSD”. As one of the authors of the model-driven software development book and with the experience background he has, this would be have been clearly very interesting. The speech he gave instead was also interesting but took little different directions.

The second day was filled with two different tracks one could attend. One covered contributions coming from the fields of research and the industry. And in the other one Ed Merks gave an intro to the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). After that, Ralf Möller of the Eclipse Foundation talked about innovation networks. The afternoon was filled with a tutorial on how to generate graphical editors using the GMF. The tutorial was given by Robert Wloch who jumped in for Jan Köhnlein (both itemis) who unfortunately got sick.

The third and last day was filled with a tutorial on xText, which was given by Peter Friese and Sven Efftinge (both itemis). Later Arno Haase (independant consultant) tought the audience how to do model-to-model and model-to-code transformations.

Summing up this was a very, very interesting event where the cremé dé la cremé of MDSD gathered and where people had the chance to ask, learn and get to know each other. Not only the speeches and tutorials were very interesting, funny but the overall event had socially a nice friendly touch. Some further pictures can be found in the FlickR gallaery.

The Workshop Proceedings can be obtained at amazon:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on MDSD Today 2008 (engl.)

Ed Merks new book will be published sometime in the beginning of 2009, here is a link to the “old” (but still good) one:

Eclipse Modeling Framework (engl.)

Also I would like to mention the book by Arno Haase, Markus Völter, Thomas Stahl, Sven Efftinge:

Modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung ( english version)

Posted in eclipse, mdsd, technology | 2 Comments »

The vacation time of most people is over, so it is time to meet and discuss a little. A good opportunity to do this will be given on September 1st in Roxie, Hamburg during the Eclipse Stammtisch. The event name translates into regular’s table and indicates a regularity of the happening. Even if the upcoming event is only the second in series I expect to meet many people after the great feedback after the last one.

Details:

• When: Monday, September 1st, 19:00 CET
• Where: Roxie, Hamburg, Germany
• Directions: http://www.roxie-hamburg.com/roxieway.htm
• Who’s comming: Doodle Poll

See you next Monday.

Posted in announce, eclipse, technology | 1 Comment »

On June 16th another Eclipse Demo Camp took place in Hamburg. Organized by Peter Friese of itemis and Martin Lippert of it-agile, Eclipse enthusiasts and presenters met in a former coffee exchange in the harbor of Hamburg, the so called “Hafencity”.

The evening started with an interesting preview of Xtext 2.0 by Sven Efftinge (also itemis). Xtext 2.0 is rewritten from scratch and provides better performance than its predecessor. The current plan for release is about October 2008. The talk was followed by a presentation given by Matthias Lübken (akquinet it-agile) who demostrated how to use the google web toolkit (GWT) in conjunction with serverside Equinox framework. Matthias talked about some of the tweaks which are necessary in order to get the two working together and also showed a little live demo. He was followed by Stefan Reichert of Lufthansa Systems who introduced his ‘wicked shell’ for Eclipse. This handy tool started as tech-demo how to bind an external process to a SWT widget. Finally, it turned into a command line, shell, bash… integration for Eclipse – featuring code completion and history. Reginald Stadlbauer (CEO froglogic) showed how to automize GUI testing of GWT and other Java based GUIs using froglogics Squish. Squish offers scripting languages like Perl, Python or JavaScript to the user to automatize application gui testing. The tool, not an Eclipse application itself, is currently rewritten and will feature full Eclipse integration sometime soon. Finally, Frank Zimmermann (Prof. at the Nordakademie) and two of his students Stefan Tanck and Henning Banneitz showed how model-driven software development (MDSD) using oAWs XText can be used to generate adapters for SAP SI in order to transform EDIFACT messages to XML and back. Unfortunately, a talk about Spring dynamic modules with OSGi was not held, the presenter Gerd Wütherich (independant consulting) was ill.

Apart from the interesting talks, it was nice to see many familiar faces, which attended the Eclipse Demo Camp in Hamburg at the end of 2007. The Eclipse Demo Camp seems to build a community. Thanks to the organizers for enabling this great event.

Posted in announce, eclipse, java, technology, tools | No Comments »

At the Eclipse DemoCamp we had the opportunity to present certain aspects of our work. Our talk concentrated on building a repository for GMF based diagram editor models. The problem there is, that GMF makes assumptions about the underlaying model which had to be worked around. In the following slides the essence of the steps necessary are explained.

Presentation Slides

 Thanks to http://www.loroma.com/ for creating and cutting the video. It is dark, but you can hear our voices, even though the presentation is in German.

Posted in eclipse, java, mdsd, technology | No Comments »

Yesterday, the first Hamburger Eclipse DemoCamp took place. About fifty participants and eight speakers met in the nice Spanish restaurant Aqui in Schanzen-District, just a step away from the Headquaters of Gentleware AG. The event was, what it should be – a local exchange of experience and know-how in the area of Eclipse. Because of the interests of Gentleware, b+m Informatik AG and itermis AG, the session was not just Eclipse-generic, but focused on MDSD topics. I liked the fact that the participants quickly build a homogenous group – all of them had some experience in PDE, EMF, etc. Amazing demo has been shown by Frank Zimmerman, who used some MDSD techniques to program the Lego Robot. A very nice start event, hopefully it can become a tradition. The photos are available in a FlickR’s Photo Set.

Posted in eclipse, java, mdsd, technology | No Comments »

I’m using Eclipse with about 40 Projects, WTP and Mylar and since 3.2.1 it is not stable anymore. Since I added this to my eclipse.ini:

-vmargs
-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m

the problems are solved.

Technorati tags: Eclipse

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