Eclipse 3.3 code named Europa was released few days back and this annual released featured a simultaneous release of 21 projects. I took Europa for a test drive and it feels much faster than Callisto (Eclipse 3.2)

Here are some of the new features worth making a note of:

Java Perspective Changes

In the default Java Perspective, the link to “New Java Project” has been added; This makes project creation faster; In 3.2, you had to select the option from the “New Project” Wizard page.

Also the New project wizard now allows you to choose a host of Java Execution Environment. Previously this was available only in the Preference page.

A preference page has replaced the Source > Clean Up wizard. Clean Up profiles can be defined on this preference page and this profile can be attached to a workspace or individual projects.

The Java class file editor now shows the disassembled bytecodes when source code is not available. I would still like to see a full fledged java decompiler integrated into Eclipse.

Java New and Noteworthy

New shortcuts including Quick Access

New shortcuts added to help you become more productive . One of the shortcuts highlighted by many of the users is the Quick Access (Ctrl + 3). As the name suggests, this keystroke helps you to quickly access views,perspectives,editors,menus etc. Additionally this dialog supports camel case search !!. The history of choices is also saved and displayed in the dialog

Eclipse Startup Processes

The way eclipse process is started has changed in Europa. Callisto used to start 2 processes

• eclipse.exe
• javaw.exe

When Eclipse used to freeze, I used to kill the above 2 processes.

With Europa, the launcher is starting only one process i.e. eclipse.exe. Need to investigate as to what change has been done in the startup class; Also not sure why this change was done !

Camel Case Search

Camel case search which was only supported in the “Open Type” (Ctrl+Shift+T) dialog is now extended to “Open Resource” (Ctrl+Shift+R) dialog. Meanwhile “Open Type” dialog now supports opening of multiple files.

Plug-in Registry Filtering

Now this is one feature not documented in the Europa New and noteworthy page. The Plug-in Registry view now supports filtering of registered plug-ins. This feature would definitely be appreciated by plug-in developers.

Nope, this filtering doesn’t support Camel Case search

The same kind of filtering is also available in the Plug-in Dependencies view.

Plug-in Development Environment

The Plug-in Development Environment has lot of new features and I would definitely recommend every plug-in developer to have a look at the official noteworthy page.

• New Sample Hello World Plug-in Template added (New Plug-in project Wizard)
• You have now more control over the Splash Image
• You can bundle the RCP application in a much better way
• Mozilla can now be used as the underlying browser control on Windows and OS X
• Quick Outline in plug-in editor source pages – Nice add-on.
• Hyperlinks now supported from the Plug-in manifest editor
• Plug-in Refactoring – Now changing the ID of plug-in is no longer a painful task. The manifest files even take part when you refactor normal files in the IDE.

PDE New and Noteworthy

Note that the Eclipse 3.3 New and noteworthy page does provide detailed info on all the new features introduced in Europa. The above features are the ones that caught my interest and some are (probably) not documented in the noteworthy page

The annual release of Eclipse code named Europa is now available for download. Like last year’s Callisto release, the Europa release is a coordinated release of different Eclipse project teams.

This year, the annual release includes 21 projects. By releasing these projects at the same time, Eclipse aims to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

I personally will be interested in exploring the following projects other than the standard Eclipse Platform/JDT/PDE

• CDT – C/C++ Development Tools
• WTP – Web Tools Platform
• GEF – Graphical Editing Framework
• GMF – Graphical Modeling Framework
• DTP – Data Tools Platform
• ECF – Eclipse Communications Framework
• STP – SOA Tools Platform

Download Eclipse Europa

Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.

Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people.

There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible architecture of the platform).

Following is the list of Eclipse Plugins for some of the popular Source Control software.

Eclipse Testing and Performance Tools Platform Project project has a great write-up on using TPTP’s automated GUI recorder.

TPTP’s Automated GUI Recorder (AGR) works by registering listeners with the SWT’s display instance to record all incoming UI events that directly correspond to user’s actions. The recorder keeps track of the context of the events and generates a script that allows the tool to playback the events in the respective order that the user recorded them. The generated script corresponds to a single test case that is embedded in a test suite which users can use to run in quick mode or standard mode (

AGR gives users the ability to also insert verification hooks based on a view, editor, or a shell. The inserted verification hook corresponds to a JUnit method with a parameter of type org.eclipse.ui.IViewPart, org.eclipse.ui.IEditorPart, or org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell. During play back, the recorder will invoke the method corresponding to the verification hook with an argument corresponding to the editor, view, or shell selected by the user

Read more on Automated GUI Recorder

Neil Bartlett, a Java developer and a consultant specializing in Eclipse RCP and OSGi is continuing his series of OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

In one of his latest post, he pointed to a paper titled “IoC Containers and Dependency Injection pattern” written by Martin Fowler.

It was worth a read and the articles section has a lot of interesting stuff. Check it out.

Also the interface of Eclipsezone is little clumsy and makes it difficult to find the series of articles written by Neil. To make things simpler, Neil has created a post in his blog linking all the OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

By the way, anybody attending EclipseCon 2007 ?

Koders is a code search engine which enables developers to easily search and browse source code hosted on thousands of open source repositories.

Krugle (which sounds like Google) is yet another search engine focused on developers and intends to make code search easier and faster.

One of the nice features about this search engine is the additional information displayed along with the search results.

There is a section which displays Code snippets from Safari Books Online. It also displays the related Open Source Projects and related Tech Pages.

Also the links within the search page as tabs and this way you don’t end up cluttering your browser.

However the search engine itself was not up to my expectation. After seeing Scoble talk high of the search engine, I took it for a test drive.

Test 1

Search Keyword : Convert String to int
Language : Java
Results: The search results listed all files having name as Convert.java and having String in the code text

Test 2

Search Keyword : parse xml/parse XML
Language : Java
Search Result : No results !!

Krugle couldn’t return any results !! Remove the space from the search keyword (parsexml) and this time Krugle is able to return some results, but not useful results !!

I ran the same keyword search on Koders and Google and these engines came up with better results.

I am not saying that Krugle is totally hopeless. The problem with Krugle and couple of other code search engines is the way they filter the search result. They map keywords to the file name as seen in “Convert.java” scenario.

In case of Java language, the Javadoc is one place where lot of information about a method is given and this could definitely be indexed and used for returning good search results.

If you want to know more about Krugle check these resources

Krugle Demo – ScreenCast

Demo and Interview (via Scoble)

P.S. I haven’t gone through these videos and screencasts. If you do go through, probably you will learn as to how to use Krugle and how to input the right keywords to get the best result out of the engine !

The OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative) is an open standards organization founded in March 1999. Over the past few years it has specified a Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed.

The core part of the specifications is a framework that defines an application life cycle model and a service registry.

The Framework implements a complete and dynamic component model – something that is missing in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot – management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail.

Life cycle management is done via API’s which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect new services, or the going away of services, and adapt accordingly.

Whenever I tried to read and understand more about OSGi I always used to get lost and confused. If you read the Wikipedia article on OSGi or even check OSGi website for details I am sure you will agree/partly agree with me

Neil Bartlett, a Java developer and a consultant specializing in Eclipse RCP and OSGi is writing a series of tutorials on OSGi at Eclipsezone. It is one of the best series of articles I have read and will definitely help you quickly get started on OSGi.

Here is the list of articles published till now:

1. Getting Started with OSGi: Your first bundle
2. Getting Started with OSGi: Interacting with the Framework
3. Getting Started with OSGi: Dependencies between Bundles
4. A Comparison of Eclipse Extensions and OSGi Services

2 more articles from IBM Developerworks are worth reading !

1. Understanding how Eclipse plug-ins work with OSGi – By Scott Delap.
2. Explore Eclipse OSGi console – By Chris Aniszczyk.

As of Eclipse 3.0, the runtime is fully based on the OSGi notion of bundle (equivalent to Eclipse plug-ins). Also there are 4 open source implementations of OSGi R4 core framework specification available and if you have already installed Eclipse you can quickly start experimenting using Equinox.

ByteMyCode is an online code and tutorial sharing site which allows users to upload snippets or tutorials containing code and text.

One interesting feature in ByteMyCode is the automatic syntax highlighting which makes the submitted code more readable.

Members can not only submit and share code; they can also revise, comment and rate(Digg Style) other code snippets. Through all these actions, members earn “byte points,” where they can move up the community rankings.

The community as of now is still small and so is the number of code snippets shared/submitted by the users. However the site is worth checking out . Also if you want to search for source code do checkout Koders !

Paul Stamatiou has written a nice series on building a web app using MySQL and PHP.

How To: Code your First Web App

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I always wanted to try my hands on PHP and these articles are pretty good to get started on PHP and MySQL.

Also don’t forget that there is a nice IDE for PHP which is being built on the Eclipse Platform

If you didn’t know Eclipse 3.3 is already in progress and you can grab the latest milestone release M4 here.

The release is code named as Europa and you can find all the new and noteworthy features here

One of the complaints with Eclipse has been the slow startup. There seems to be a major improvement in performance in terms of startup and UI responsiveness.

I am still using Java 1.4 and was contemplating on move to Java 5/1.5 and lo Java 6 is out.

Ok now if you are confused with these version numbers check this page.

I am still to get in terms with the new features of Java 1.5 itself and now Java 6 seems to come with a bunch of more goodies !

Also Sun seems to be marketing their Netbeans IDE with this release

Java SE 6 is the current major release of the Java SE platform, with full support from NetBeans IDE 5.5.

I have tried to use NetBeans couple of times and I have to say that probably it will never match Eclipse !

The latest release of Eclipse i.e 3.2 already supports Java 6 features !

By the way Google joined the Eclipse foundation recently as a add-in provider :)

How many of you are already using Java 5 ? If you are ready to make a jump to Java 6 head over to the download page

Google Reader, the online RSS reader from Google had a major upgrade some time back. Check this post to know more about Google Reader.

Mihai Parparita, one of the lead developer of Google Reader has written a Greasemonkey Script to add Reader into GMail. The script added a “Feeds” link within GMail as shown below:

Winston has written another Greasemonkey script to integrate Reader into GMail. Some of the new features are:

• Spilt-window view of GMail and Reader on a single page - I definitely didn’t like this layout, its just not fit for widescreen monitors I guess.
• Links to collapse|expand either GMail or Reader – GMail and Reader are shown in a split pane and this can be collapsed and expanded.
• Integrated Reader uses start-page as specified in Reader’s “Settings”
• Labels selector – You can view the feeds based on the labels in Reader
• Key ‘v’ to open Reader links in a new Window
• Automatic resize of GMail and Reader views

Snapshot:

Requirements to Install the Script

1. Firefox
2. Greasemonkey
3. Winstons Script (Reader in GMail)

Alternatively, you can also try out Mihai’s script here.

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.

I use PuTTY for 2 primary reasons

1. It can save the session information and I can quickly load the session of my choice (i.e. I don’t need to remember the IP details etc)

   

2. It has support for SSH sessions.

The application is a single executable file and its pretty easy to configure and use. A step by step guide for configuring Putty can be found here. The only drawback is that for every session, I have to open a new window, and especially when you are working with say 3-5 sessions, the desktop gets clogged.

Poderosa is an alternative application which can be used instead of PuTTY. It has all the features of Putty with these additional features:

Tabbed style GUI

It is convenient to open multiple connections at the same time. Moreover, you can split the window into panes and allocate each connection.

Different Connection methods.

In addition to Telnet and SSH1/2, local cygwin shell and serial ports are supported.

Options and tools

A lot of functions for terminals are available. For example, SSH2 port forwarding tool, SSH Key generation wizard, SOCKS connection.

Plugin architecture

You can extend the feature of Poderosa by plugins like Eclipse. Serial port and X/ZModem are provided as additional plugins. A manual for plugin developers is included the installation package.

The only feature which I liked personally was the Tabbed Style UI. However, the drawback of this tool is that it requires .NET Framework which has to be installed separately.

Download Poderosa 4.0.2

Eclipse as of today is the industry’s major non-Microsoft software tool platform. The number of companies adopting this platform is a testimonial of the platform’s success.

(Check my previous post for more on the history of Eclipse IDE)

Eclipse has a well-designed, and extensible architecture. What is valuable about Eclipse is that it provides an open source platform for creating an extensible integrated development environment. This platform allows anyone to build tools that integrate seamlessly with the environment and other tools.

The key to the seamless integration of tools with Eclipse is the plug-in. With the exception of a small run-time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. This means that a plug-in you develop integrates with Eclipse in exactly the same way as other plug-ins.

Any new person who is introduced to Eclipse in concerned with one important question : How to Install Eclipse Plugins ?

There are lot of useful, high quality third party plugins available and all the plugin installation instructions specify at most 2 ways to install Eclipse Plugins

Normal Ways of Installing Eclipse Plugin

I will take the Eclipse Webtools Plugin to describe the 2 “normal” ways of installing Eclipse Plugins. In the next section I will show how the same can be done in a “easy” way.

This is how the Eclipse SDK folder structure looks like:

After extracting the Webtools package you have this folder hierarchy:

One of the common method of installing is to copy the contents of the “features” into the “features” folder of eclipse, and do the same with the “plugins” folder.

The other way of installing, which Eclipse also recommends is via the Update Manager.

You can choose the components you wish to install, choose the dependent plugins etc. In this process, generally you select the default installation location specified by the wizard.

The advantage with this approach is that when you select a component you are also made aware of the dependent plugins that needs to be installed. For e.g. If I select Web Tools, I am also told to select/install GEF

The disadvantage with this approach is that it never works well in a low bandwidth environment. I have struggled so many times to install via update manager, somewhere its gets stuck and I am left with a partially installed, corrupted environment.

The Easy Way

Now for the “Easy” way of installing Eclipse Plugins. Very few people are aware of this concept and Eclipse somehow doesn’t seem to document this approach anywhere.

This method uses the concept of “Links”. Here is the step by step procedure. (In the explanation I have used the installation of Webtools as the example)

1. Create a folder named links inside the eclipse folder (See Picture below)

2. Create a new file inside this folder and name it as say wtp.link. Note that the file name can be any valid string, but the extension has to be link.

3. Assuming that I have copied the Web tools into D:\thirdparty as shown below,

the contents of wtp.link has to be this:

path=D:/thirdparty/wtp

Points to Note:

• The string should always start with “path=” keyword.
• The path should point to a directory which has a “eclipse” folder which in turn has “features” and “plugins” as sub-folders
• It is recommended to use forward slash ‘/’ in the path (If you want use Backslash, see that you use the escape character i.e. in Windows it should be “\”)
• The file extension should end with “link“
• The file (i.e wtp.link in our example) should exist in the “links” folder.
• It is recommended to create link files only for big plugins/applications. For small plugins you can create just one link file, say misc.link and copy all the small plugins to the path referred by this link.

Restart Eclipse and now all the plugins and feature descriptions should be read from the path referred by the “link” files.

Advantages

Eclipse has a lot of top level and technology projects. To experiment with these projects, the “links” concept comes to the rescue. You can extract the plugin to a “thirdparty” (or a folder of your choice) and just link it within the eclipse installation. My current configuration looks like this:

Eclipse Projects/Third Party Plugins

Corresponding Link files

The “Copy” approach just bloats the eclipse installation and you cannot remove/uninstall the plugin easily. With links approach, you can just remove the “link” file and the plugin is uninstalled !!

The same links directory can be used in another eclipse installation. For e.g. if you are working with Milestone or different version of Eclipse, you can just copy the links folder (containing .link files) and the plugins are installed.

It is very easy to manage different versions of a plugin. If a new version doesn’t work, reverting back to a previous version is pretty easy.

Also, if you use the update feature in Eclipse, you can choose one of the above folders as the installation directory.

Conclusion

This approach seems to work fine in both windows and linux. I am not sure why this approach is not documented in Eclipse. I found out about this when I was using the trial version of RAD (Rational Application Developer). It was used primarily to manage product extensions. I believe the same concept can be used to manage plugins (Install/Uninstall).

Using Dropins to install Eclipse plugins

One of the problems with the above “link” approach is the plugin dependency resolution. This has to be take care of manually by the plugin installer. If the install is done via the UI, it manage to find and install all the dependencies.

Staring from Eclipse 3.4, Eclipse SDK has a new provisioning system called Equinox/p2.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Getting_Started

p2 supports the notion of watched directories and this directory a user or a script can drop “files”. Eclipse platform ships with one such default watched directory called dropins

The dropins folder is configured to be scanned during startup, and for changes to be immediately applied to the running system. Thus the dropins folder can be used much like the plugins directory was used in the past.

A subtle twist on old behavior here is that plug-ins and features added to the dropins folder are properly installed into the system rather than being forced in. This means p2 has an opportunity to confirm that the new plug-in doesn’t conflict with other installed plug-ins, and it can even go out and fetch any missing prerequisites of the newly dropped in plug-ins.

This also means you can later use the GUI to install extra functionality that depends on the plug-ins in the dropins folder, since p2 knows about them and can reason about their dependencies. In other words, new plug-ins installed via the dropins folder behave exactly like plug-ins installed via the user interface.

Supported dropin formats:

1. You can just drop the plugin jar in the dropins folder

2. You can also drop in the traditional Eclipse application or extension layout directly in the dropins folder

3. You can add an additional layer of folders immediately below the dropins folder that contain traditional Eclipse extensions

4. Or you can add link files as in the Eclipse links folder

Hope this post was useful, if you had any problems using this approach, do leave a comment with the problem description.

Thanks to Bryan Solan for the Dropins reference.

I was not even aware that there was a search engine dedicated for searching source code. Thanks again to StumbleUpon !

In fact after digging through Google search results, I got to know that this tool existed for quite some time

About Koders

Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.

Every month Koders generates a report on the keywords used in the search tool. It generates a list of top searched keyword, top solutions (i.e. downloaded code) and top projects.

On the enterprise side, Koders offer an “Enterprise Edition” which can be used by companies to index their internal codebase.

Koders also has a nice little Eclipse Plugin which helps you to search source code from within the Eclipse IDE. For more information check this demo.

There are plugins for NetBeans and Visual Studio as well ! Try it out

In the late 1990s, IBM began development of what we now know as Eclipse. In the mid-1990s, a number of powerful commercial development environments were available; Microsoft Visual Studio was becoming a more general-purpose tools platform. A number of Java-based IDEs were also coming into play, including Symantec’s Visual Café, Borland’s JBuilder, IBM’s Visual Age for Java, and others.

Primary Goal

The platform began development by Object Technology International in 1998 (a subsidiary of IBM purchased in 1996, now known as the IBM Ottawa Lab) to address the problems raised by customers that dealt with the cohesiveness of IBM software tooling. Customers complained that IBM’s tooling looked like it came from different companies and didn’t work together.

IBM wanted to establish a common platform for all their development products to avoid duplicating the most common elements of infrastructure. This would allow customers using multiple tools built by different parts of IBM to have a more integrated experience as they switched from one tool to another

Beginning of the phenomenon

In November 1998, the OTI team was given the go ahead because they had experience building several generations of IDEs. Also, another IBM team was going to build the first product on this new platform.

The two teams were separate organizationally within IBM. An interesting feature was that they wanted to build a great Java IDE to attract people to the platform. Good strategy. Come for the Java IDE, stay for the platform. (However whenever Eclipse is mentioned , many people think of it as a Java IDE, this a misconception and Eclipse is much more than a Java IDE)

One goal of IBM was that they wanted to be competitive with Visual Studio, especially on Windows. This led to the design of SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit). This component gives Eclipse the native look and feel. I guess this also drove the platform decision to loosely couple the JDT (Java Development Tool) from the Platform, which is one thing why it makes it different from NetBeans.

In fact the name “Eclipse” actually means “to eclipse Visual Studio.”

However the growth of the platform had one problem: The business partners were initially reluctant to invest in the (as yet unproven) platform. So in November 2001, IBM decided to adopt the open source licensing and operating model for this technology to increase exposure and accelerate adoption. IBM, along with eight other organizations, established the Eclipse consortium and eclipse.org. Initial members included (then-partners) Rational Software and TogetherSoft, as well as competitors WebGain and Borland. Membership in the consortium required only a bona fide (but non-enforced) commitment to Eclipse to use it internally, to promote it, and to ship a product based on it.

As Eclipse grew and became more well-known, there were growing pains: It seemed that IBM was controlling it, so vendors were wary of joining. The ones that did join were not that serious yet !. So, the Eclipse Foundation was created in February 2004, right before EclipseCon 2004.

After formation of Eclipse foundation..

The move to form a Eclipse foundation was a great success. The new and independent Eclipse Foundation shipped Eclipse 3.0, and soon afterwards, Eclipse 3.1; both were received with even higher degrees of interest and adoption rates than the prior version. There was a big growth in membership, with BEA one of the newest and biggest. IBM itself has adopted Eclipse aggressively and has contributed considerable amount of code in the form of WTP (Web Tools Platform) and TPTP.

Today Eclipse foundation has about 14 strategic members, each of them commits at least eight full-time developers and up to $250,000 annually to the Eclipse foundation.The Eclipse Foundation also has four strategic consumers who also make a similar economic commitment. There are ninety six companies serving as add-in providers, and another seventeen associate member companies. If you peruse the software industry, you’ll find hundreds of commercial plug-ins and products for Eclipse.

Eclipse is now the industry’s major non-Microsoft software tool platform.

Tags: Eclipse History, IBM, WTP, TPTP, OTI

Check out this link to learn more about Linux Command line and Shell scripting

http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/index.php

The content is nicely organized and should be very useful for Unix/Linux newbies and probably even for people knowing Unix

Tags: Linux, Shell scripting, Linux Command