EclipseCon 2012

This year's EclipseCon was especially exciting because my colleague Anders and I had a talk accepted and was one of a few highlighted sessions.

Our talk was about sharing our experiences of migrating one of FindOut's tools to the new Rich Client Platform "RCP 2.0" in Eclipse 4.2:

Here are the highlights from the conference:

Monday:

The conference started out with an excellent tutorial on writing rich client applications with Eclipse RCP 4.x by Kai Toedter. He also showed that the default SWT rendering engine in the platform can be replaced with Swing. He used the Napkin theme for his contacts demo. Very impressive!

Tuesday:

Tom Schindl explained the new application platform and showed how to easily pool resources and a locale support service that he connected to google translate. The audience was asked for a language to translate to, and without restarting the application "Hello World" was switched to "Hallo Verden" (Norwegian). Impressive!

Brian de Alwis showed how to style your 4.x application with CSS. He also demoed the nifty CSS Spy and editors. For us who had little knowledge of CSS this tool came in real handy.

Alexander Nyßen gave a comprehensive overview and history of GEF. He also explained GEF4 and the main priorities to introduce there. We were especially glad that one of the bullets was to migrate GEF to use the new 4.x application platform.

Wednesday:

Figuring out the compat layer

Tom Schindl talked about e(fx)clipse which is a distribution of Eclipse for creating JavaFX applications. He also showed that the default SWT rendering engine in can be replaced with JavaFX.

After lunch it was time for us to present.  We were happy to see that we had about 60-70 attendees in the room. The presentation and demo went very well and we had a very good discussion with the audience during the Q/A.

In the evening we attended the e4 BOF which was well attended with all the key people from development and a number of users. One interesting topic was how the solve the problem of having multiple dependency injection frameworks. One example is that Xtext uses Guice. It was also noted that 4.2 is lacking a documented API, something that will be addressed in 4.3. Many of the common UI components such as the Properties view, the Project Explorer and the Preference dialog need to be migrated to the new platform services.

Thursday:

Eclipse 4 meets CDO - inspiring demo of what you can do with the modeled application. Since the application model is implemented using EMF, CDO can be used to share it between multiple users. Think instant content sharing and collaboration using the application model.

In the closing session it was revealed that the conference had 650 attendees with 360 of them first-timers. 36 countries and 41 US states were represented. There were 2972 complaints on the WiFi according to Mike Milinkovic. All of this was washed down with almost 7000 beers.

One valuable thing for us was meeting and mingling with everyone including other swedes from companies such as Ericsson, Sandvik, IAR and Oracle...

It was also great to meet the e4 team face to face. We would especially like to thank Remy Suen for fixing a bug that we ran into when migrating our application.

Finally, a special thanks to the Eclipse Foundation for yet another great Eclipse conference!

References

1. We've made some example code available on github.
2. Bug 374597 - [Compatibility] ClassCastException when adding pure 4.x view to 3.x perspective running in compatibility mode

Controlling Eclipse Preferences

Ever struggled with preference settings in Eclipse?
A typical case is where you have to over and over again reapply the same preferences in to new workspaces and projects. Quite tiresome.

This problem was addressed during this years EclipseCon in the talk Getting Eclipse Preferences Under Control in Teams. Here we learned of three parallel projects addressing in different ways the same issue:

• Eclipse Team Etceteras
• Workspace Mechanic
• Bug 334016

Full presentation is available here.

Shortly after the session, I also stumbled across a post on the e4-dev list announcing yet another initiative e4preferences.

Given that there is a fair number of attempts to address various aspects of the "preference problem", I now hope that we can work together to, if not once and for all solve, but at least improve the preference sharing support for end users.

Except for Bug 334016, there's wikis describing what they do, so I'll have a go at explaining it.

The name of this feature is "Common Preferences" and was developed for Ericsson in order to address the problem of sharing "common preferences" between users and teams in the larger enterprise.

It has been deployed and successfully used for about 4 years now.
For the end user, the typical case could be that he/she never notices that Common Preferences is there to help out. This is accomplished by installing the feature along with everything else in the Eclipse based product and having it preconfigured to set key preferences (such as network proxies etc) upon creating a workspace.

In addition to this, the users can then add their own preferences to the list of what is to be managed. There's a neat export wizard allowing the user to identify what preferences are modified (i.e. changed from their default values) and thus helping the user to compile a Eclipse preference file which later can be imported by others in the team (including the user him/herself). It also allows the comparison of applied preferences with those defined by the Common Preferences.

As of writing, I'm waiting for this bug to progress further through the submission process. Ideally, it could result in an improved preference sharing support in the platform, possibly by merging the key features from the various initiatives addressing this gaping hole.

Why don't you go ahead and vote on bug 334016 ...