Vancouver Eclipse Demo Camp 2010

Last night, 31 Eclipse developers from the Vancouver, BC area met up, listened to a few great talks, went for some beers, and had a great time. We had 8 speakers who surprisingly all stayed within their allotted time of 8 minutes (maybe it was a threat of a nerf gun that did it...I don't know). The pace was brisk and we heard lots of good things from lots of great developers from around Vancouver.

This year's Demo camp was sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation, SpringSource (a division of VMWare), and TaskTop.

Mik Kersten, Tasktop, Welcome and Eclipse Ecosystem Overview

Mik Kersten started the evening off with a brief introduction to some new features in the new Helios release. In addition to modernizing SWT to integrate better with Windows 7, and new Mylyn connectors, the most interesting new feature he described was the Eclipse Market Place. In the past, finding new content to install into your Eclipse installation required users to go to an external browser, find a link to an update site, and copy it into your update manager. Now, all this can be done transparently through the market place client from within Eclipse.

Kris De Volder, SpringSource, AspectJ and AJDT

Next up was Kris De Volder, a new colleague of mine that we snatched from the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He demoed some of his new work on AJDT, specifically the new Pull-Out refactoring that allows users to pull-out fields and methods from classes and convert them into intertype declarations. This will be available in the upcoming 2.1.0 release of AJDT.

He also demoed the Push-In refactoring, the converse of Pull-Out, which takes existing intertype declarations and pushes them into their target types. This is work that I did a short while ago and is described here.

Emerson Murphy-Hill, UBC, How Are People Using Eclipse?

Emerson showcased some of his research at UBC on how Eclipse is being used, or not used by developers. Some of the most surprising results of his research, in my opinion, are how little all of the various refactorings are used inside of Eclipse. And how the ones that are popular are not the ones that I personally use.

My personal favorites are rename (field, method, type, etc), extract (local, constant, and method), and convert local variable to field. Apparently, not many people use the last one. But (oddly, in my opinion), inline method seems to be quite popular---something I've never used.

David Dossot, MuleSoft, MuleSoft Tool Suite

David gave a brief tour of MuleIDE, which provides tool support for creating and managing your MuleSoft projects in Eclipse. David used MuleIDE to access road work data from the city of Vancouver and built a simple application to determine how many kilometers of roadwork are currently underway in Vancouver. Not bad for 8 minutes!

Alex Bradley, UBC, Source Code History at Your Fingertips

Do you use the "Show annotations" feature of CVS or SVN? I actually didn't know about this. Using "Show anotations" will add gutter markers on lines changed by recent commits to the source repository. Hovering over the annotations will provide extra information.

Alex showed his enhancements to the Java editor, which converted these annotations into semi-transparent overlays that co-exist with the source code. This is work that Alex has done for his master's thesis at UBC. I liked how his enhancements made version changes more explicit in the editor.

Nieraj Sing, SpringSource, Groovy language and Grails Support in the SpringSource Tool Suite

Nieraj is another new colleague of mine at SpringSource. He's a summer student from the University of Victoria. Nieraj showed his recent enhancements of Grails support in the SpringSource Tool Suite. He showed the Grails explorer view, which allows developers to view their Grails projects organized in a way that emphasizes artifacts and structure specific to Grails projects. He also showed his work on the Grails Plugin Manager, which allows developers to view, install, update, and uninstall Grails plugins into their projects.

Luke Evans, Indicee

Luke introduced the CAL programming language, a lazy-functional language developed by him and others when he worked at Business Objects (now SAP). He showed how programmers can use CAL to quickly and easily compose functions to manipulate streams of data in complex ways. It is this language that forms the core of the business reporting tool produced by his company, Indicee.

Bjorn Gustafsson, ProjectKoach

Finally, Bjorn showed ProjectKoach, an RCP application that brings agile planning into Eclipse. He showed how you can create sprints, manage tasks, integrate with version control, and integrate with bug trackers through Mylyn.

No more handles?

I manage 4 Eclipse PDE builds on two different build servers. Three days ago, I started getting this same exception when running the JUnit tests for all 4 of the builds:

org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [gtk_init_check() failed]
 at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3910)
 at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.createDisplay(Display.java:863)
 at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.create(Display.java:851)
 at org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Device.(Device.java:152)
 at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:479)
 at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:470)
 at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createDisplay(Workbench.java:532)
 at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createDisplay(PlatformUI.java:161)
 at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.createDisplay(IDEApplication.java:143)
 at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:88)
 at org.eclipse.test.UITestApplication.runApplication(UITestApplication.java:138)
 at org.eclipse.test.UITestApplication.run(UITestApplication.java:60)
...

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why all four builds would be failing in the same exact way even though they span Eclipse versions (Galileo and Helios), and servers. All links I could track down seemed to imply that the root cause are SWT resources that are not properly disposed.

It turns out that solution was a bit more banal than that. There were no leaks in my code. Instead, this exception occurred because there was no virtual display available on the build servers for running the UI tests. Xvfb had shut down. After a restart of Xvfb, the tests are now running as expected.

Now, why Xvfb would happen to shut down on both servers at the same time still befuddles me, but the problem is fixed. I just hope that the next person who sees this problem doesn't also immediately think there is a resource leak, and pull their hair out to find it.

Extending Groovy-Eclipse for use with Domain-Specific Languages Part II

A while ago, I wrote an article about how to extend Groovy-Eclipse for domain specific languages. It was always my intention to write a follow-up that included an example project. Thanks to some prodding on the mailing list, here it is, 5 months later. I finally have an example Groovy-Eclipse extension project available.

The code mostly speaks for itself, so if you are interested in how to extend Groovy-Eclipse, first read part I of this article, and then download the example project.

Here is the example plugin project that extends Groovy-Eclipse. Import this plugin into your Eclipse development workspace.

And here is a simple runtime project that uses all of the extensions provided in the plugin project. Import this project into your Eclipse runtime workspace. If you want to create your own project that uses this example, be sure to add the following project nature to your .project file:

org.codehaus.groovy.eclipse.example.nature

Once again, the code speaks for itself, so there is nothing more that I need to say about it. Enjoy!

Vancouver Eclipse Demo Camp 2010

The Vancouver Eclipse DemoCamp is on once again! This year, it is sponsored
by the Eclipse foundation ( http://eclipse.org ), Tasktop Technologies (
http://tasktop.com ), and others (see p.s.).   This June 29 come out and showcase your Eclipse
based products/tools/research to a crowd of local enthusiasts in a casual
environment. If you are interested in giving a short (10min) presentation,
please send us an email and add yourself to the wiki.

Those who just want to stop by for a beer and see what cool new Eclipse
based technology is being developed in your home town, please register by
adding your name to the wiki as well.

Date: June 29th 6:30pm
Location: TBD  (Likely Robson Square as usual)
After party: 8:00 (location TBD)
Keep an eye on the wiki page to see the finalized schedule

Last year, we had a great turnout with over 50 attendees and some amazing
demos.  It's an excellent opportunity to get to know the local Eclipse
community.  Hope to see you there!

Thanks,

Robert (Tasktop) and Andrew (SpringSource, a division of VMWare)

p.s. - In previous years, the event was fully funded by the Eclipse foundation, but
this year (in part, due to the world-wide success of these events), the
foundation no longer has the budget to provide the same level of funding. 
We are therefore looking sponsorship from the community. If your
company would like to foster the Vancouver Eclipse community, provide extra
branding for the event, and a dedicated speaker slot, please contact us. 

Groovy-Eclipse for Helios

Today we released our first snapshot of a Groovy-Eclipse build for Eclipse 3.6 (Helios). We haven't set the continuous build system up yet, so for now if you are looking to try it out, you can download the zip here:

http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.6/groovy-update-site-e36.zip

And then point your p2 installer to the downloaded archive. You will then be able to install Groovy-Eclipse. We have only tested on 3.6 M6 and we will continue to ensure that it works on later milestones as they come out.

As always, your feedback is appreciated!

EDIT (June 30, 2010): the zip above is outdated and so I removed it. Please use the update site below instead:

http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.6/

AJDT-PDE builds Redux

AspectJ-aware PDE builds in AJDT have always been a bit of a kludge. So, I'm happy to say that as of Eclipse 3.6 (Helios), things will be changing for the better and AJDT will rely on a different mechanism to perform PDE builds.

PDE, or the Plugin Development Environment, is the tool set that helps developers build plugins for the Eclipse platform itself. In Eclipse 3.5 and earlier, AJDT shipped with its own version of the PDE tools (AJDT-PDE) that were largely a copy of Eclipse's PDE, but with a few key changes so that a different compiler could be plugged in. It is an understatement to say that this was inefficient. The AJDT-PDE had to be re-created for each point release of Eclipse so that it could be re-based off of the new version of PDE. This process was fallible and inevitably, some features of PDE were missing or broken in AJDT-PDE.

I have been working with the PDE team to create a more sustainable solution to AspectJ-aware PDE builds. From AJDT for Eclipse 3.6 and onwards, the AJDT-PDE will be removed. The AspectJ-aware export wizards will be deprecated and the org.eclipse.ajdt.pde.build plugin will be redundant. Instead, users can use the standard PDE build, with the following changes to the build.properties file of your plugin project:

# required
compilerAdapter=org.eclipse.ajdt.core.ant.AJDT_AjcCompilerAdapter
sourceFileExtensions=*.java, *.aj

# optional
compilerArg=-aspectpath other.jar

The first line specifies that the AspectJ compiler should be used instead of the Java compiler. The second line specifies what file types should be considered source files. And optionally, you can specify a number of command line arguments using the compilerArg property. Only AspectJ-specific arguments like inpath and aspectpath need to be specified here. For all standard Java options, like source and target you can use the standard PDE-Java options javacSource and javacTarget.

From here, you can use the standard PDE export wizards or PDE headless build scripts to build your project. That's it. There is now nothing special needed for AspectJ-aware PDE builds.

Furthermore, it is possible to create your own compiler adapter so that you can use your own custom compiler for your own JVM language (and avoid using javac). You need to do the following:

1. Implement org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.compilers.CompilerAdapter and delegate to the compiler of your choice


2. Ensure that this new compiler adapter is on the ant classpath. I recommend using a org.eclipse.ant.core.extraClasspathEntries extension point so that your plugin automatically contributes the classpath to Eclipse's ant runtime. But, you could also specify it in your global ant classpath properties page.


3. In your build.properties file, fill in the proper values for the compilerAdapter, the sourceFileExtensions, and the compilerArg properties.
   

That's really all there is to it. For all the gory details on how this works see Bug 303960.

Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.1 Released and see you at EclipseCon!

We are proud to release to announce the release of Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.1. This release is primarily a service refresh of 2.0, but there are a couple of interesting new features including debug stack frame filtering and Eclipse 3.5.2 support. You can read the New and Noteworthy.

The update site for the release is here:

  http://dist.springsource.org/release/GRECLIPSE/e3.5/

This is also a good time to promote my talk at EclipseCon. I will be speaking about Groovy-Eclipse on Wednesday, March 24 at 2pm.

Getting Groovy with Eclipse: Next Generation Tool Support for Dynamic Languages. Come hear how Groovy-Eclipse has extended the JDT compiler to provide deep integration between Groovy and Java. Also hear about how Groovy-Eclipse provides editing support for Groovy's dynamicism through type inferencing.

See you at EclipseCon!