Does anyone need an Eclipse developer?

GSOC is about to end.
There is a time for change. Maybe not at the moment but in very near future. I have some reasons, personal one to move to Frankfurt for a longer time. The personal one.
If you are looking for Eclipse developer, Java (plain, Struts2, Spring, Hibernate ...), requirements engineer, analyst, designer. If you are looking for such a person in nearby Frankfurt/Main, Mainz, or for remote work. Please let me know.
If you are doing software architecture analysis or think about doing that, or you are looking for young software architect who want to learn, and learns real fast you are my dreamed employer ;)

End of the GSOC 2008

It was nice adventure with the GSOC this year. But my journey with the PDE customization support is not finished. We need to make it as useful as we can.
But I owe all of you some summary. What we have on board:

• Remove features from tree (Views, Commands etc.. - in general all IPluginElements / IPluginExtensions if you are familiar with the PDE Product model)
  
• Changing name of nodes.
  
• Launching product with transformations
  
• Exporting product with transformations
  

To make it work make sure that transformation hook is located in the same place as org.eclipse.osgi. It can be issue during the launch (when you exporting all plug-ins ends in the same location).

Code is in the same place it was before - so in code.google.com repo. If you want to make it run you will probably need also ant.ui from the Eclipse HEAD, as I also try to sync the pde.core and pde.ui with the HEAD (cause next step is to make Product Customizations part of Eclipse 3.5 Mx).

If you want to watch presentation please use this link (I've resigned from youtube hosting cause I cannot place there high quality movies) or the uncompressed version with annotations.

Product configuration will let you set plugin options

So what was the path to this point. First I implemented some Product Customization features. Then I was struggling with product export function but finally it works. Just recently I've started to work on launching with transformations. And now is time for changes. We should be able to add users possibility to set plug-ins properties. Start level, osgi properties ...
What I can say it is not small step for me and big for the mankind, it's rather opposite.
Any way as programming in Eclipse is making life simpler, I hope this new feature will make it simpler for some of you. At the screen shoot how it look at the moment.

Product Customization - reactivation

It is time to start with the second part. As you can easy see if you tried use the Product Customization tooling, as it is now, there is much to do. As removal parts of description works pretty well there is no other type of action supported at the moment.
Another feature missing is launching product with the transformations applied. This problem affects more than just Product Customization tooling and it is now described in this bug. If you have any comments feel free to share with us.
I'm starting working... this is first task on my GSOC list for the second part of the program.

Product Customization in action

I just created some movie showing all features implemented in first milestone. Unfortunately quality of video is very low after uploading it to google videos. (this may change in the future but now it is like it is :/)

Basically how it works. We have new tab called customization which enables us to add customization. The only available at the moment is removal of the extension or element from the bundles tree. This way we can remove some view or function from the target RCP application.

So build new product description file, add bundles for your product, configure destination environment, add customizations, export product, start it...

And here also under Linux (I truly don't know how to publish some screencast with better quality :/)

So if you are interested in higher quality videos you: Linux and Windows versions.

Procuct Customizations (transforms) GSOC milestone

there is time for semirelax, everything goes as planned.

Costumes Transformers
Hochgeladen von kendy

PDE Product Customization at code.google.com

As I've said before this is I placed the code at code.google.com.
The think that should be higlighted here is that google doesn't know about EPL.
It sad to see that so at the moment code is shared with BSD license.
To get the code please refer to http://code.google.com/p/product-customization/ page.

To make code working you also may need
org.eclipse.equinox.transforms.xslt
org.eclipse.equinox.transforms.hook
from the Eclipse repository.

before milestone

there are several things to do before adding feature produced in first part of program.

1. Product Customization branch will be synchronized with HEAD
   
2. both plug-ins will be placed in code.google.com before producing Eclipse patch.
   

Question is: will it be long weekend ? ;)

Product Customization mock

This is a very roughly view of what Product Customization section can look like in the near future.

All user transformations planed in PDE will be available through context menu in Extension section. There also view for the product with changes is visible

Transformations section will enable us to remove transformation we no longer needed. But this is also a overview of all transformation added to the product

Something is done but much more is to be done. Even with action simple as Remove there is a lot of work. While it can be applied for extension point or its children there is a bit of work with overlapping transformations (in the parent child manner). But there is also something even more important (but will be addressed later on). How should we handle removal of extension point in one plug-in for its clients ?

Relearning SWT

I've started with Product Customization some time ago, most of the time I've spent on doing "research code" and designing structure. Many times I've been choosing not exactly optimal ways, but thanks to the Kim's voice of wisdom I am on the right track.
I started with finishing what already was done in the Product Customization are, as I wanted also to add some funny details I am working right now on visualizing removed nodes from the plugins tree.
What hit me was that I don't really know to create stroked text in viewer. I started with Font. Where if not there looking for that ? But to my surprise there is no strike. Well after some research in internet the answer is simple: You can get stroked font but only on Windows.
How to put that to TreeViewer use label provider which is also IFontProvider.

Aproximation of approximation of ...

Approximation is sometimes only way to make something reasonable.
What is the problem:
When you are adding new transformation you need to describe for which plug-ins it should be applied.
Now simple approach is taken - choose the first one found. The problem is that it can return strange errors when you will add new pattern which also matches other plug-in.


We've been talking how to deal with that and most reasonable approach is to find most specific pattern that matches resource name. But as we need fast solution we decide use something that have chance to work better than simple "choose first" approach.
First take all matches and choose the best one of them. What choose the best means ? Choose most specialized pattern.
From my observation seems that patterns are rather simple and choose the "longest pattern" strategy should work in most cases.
So ? Choose the exact name or the longest pattern.
I am far from claiming that this solution is working in all cases. In fact there are thousand of examples it's not. But it gives you answer when you will find some unexpected result and want to check which pattern was applied.

Product Customization

There is high time to provide you with some useful links in case you are interested in this project. First of all wiki page in PDE incubator projects category. The second one in case you like to follow project on bugzilla.
I will try to add some content to the wiki page this week.

GSOC 2008 - Eclipse

With the start of my adventure in Frankfurt GSOC adventure has started. This year I apply for the project in Eclipse PDE and I've got it (as announced yesterday). I'm very pleased with the fact that this is a way to add the biggest piece of software to Eclipse in one chunk since I've started.
Kim has been sentenced to work with me ;)

If you want to follow the project in the bugzilla here is the way.
If you have any suggestion please leave a comment.