GSoC 2010

Now that Google announced that they will sponsor this year again students to work on some cool open-source projects, I hope Eclipse foundation will be candidate again.

Mentoring organizations should candidate before March 12, but we could start now to collect ideas, they could be contributed on the wiki. GSoC is an incredible opportunity for eclipse community to see enhancements or new features added to your favorite projects, do not miss it !

If you are a student and don't know how to get involved, have a look to our new contribute page.

you will find more info on the GSoC 2010 flyer and important date on the timeline.

Sketch capabilities for your GEF based editor

As everyone, I suppose you have seen iPad videos, at least you heard about it :

iPad from stadycam on Vimeo.

I suppose you have complained about its closed platform, its single-task os, or may be its tendentious commercial name. However with such a device (a tablet), you think your GEF based editor could benefit from sketch capabilities ? Indeed that something Ugo Sangiorgi did :

OmniModeling on MoLIC Editor from Ugo Sangiorgi on Vimeo.

The good news is that it will probably be contributed to Eclipse.org. If you are interested, have a look to this new project proposal.

Know your limits

Thanks to OSGi one of the main qualities of Eclipse ecosystem is its modularity.
In a modular architecture, contract between components is fundamental. I called contract not only the features offered by a component but also its limitations. Quite often we tend to concentrate on features and and miss limitations.

To illustrate my point I will take as an example SWT Eclipse component
I recently needed to add printing support to a custom editor. SWT provides some printing API. I first tried an approach which consisted of printing a snapshot of my already drawn widget. I did it using the SWT faq and added quite easily header, footer and fit to page support but it remained a blocking bug. Sometimes, randomly, a white shadow (of the previously opened print dialog) appeared on my printed widget. I tried to hack by calling redraw and update methods on the control but as I am not a graphic guru I gave up and finally have implemented the printing feature with success using the excellent PaperClips library.

During my hack attempt I saw in code that Printer.getDPI() returns always 72X72 in SWT GTK implementation. I don't want to blame anyone neither SWT nor GTK, just remark that on linux print is not completely supported, and this information may be difficult to find until your get the bug or read concerned code.

So quick reminder for developers : think to document your component limitations !

GEF support in SWTbot and GMF

Back from ESE where I gave my presentation about GEF support in SWTBot last week, I am happy to announce that GEF feature is available in SWTBot update site. Thanks Ketan for that.




Quite obviously there are several bugs opened and there is room for improvement but current API is not frozen, so it's time to test and ask for enhancements !

On GMF side I updated yesterday its main wiki page to use tabs. There is a lot of valuable information available on the wiki for GMF, but it was scattered. I hope you find the new page clearer and useful.

Nathalie effect : goals, tests and patches

In the last post I blogged about La baule beach. This week-end it was the famous triathlon race in the atlantic seacoast city. At Obeo we try to participate each year to the tri relay. Tri relay distance is quite similar to a triathlon Sprint distance, but each sport event (swimming, cycling, and running) is performed by a different person. This year Ed participated with us. He took the opportunity to be in Nantes to went for a fresh swim early in the morning. During the race, Freddy, Goulwen, Laurent, Nathalie, Stéphane and others cheer for us. Despite of these many supporters, I did not beat a time, to be honest I was one of the slower cyclist. However the tri relay was not the significant competition, the football match on the sand after it was the real one ! After one hour and half we grab a victory and Nathalie was the key of our success ! In the evening we were very well received by Cédric, with a giant and delectable barbecue. Friday and today I worked on GEF Support for SWTBot. If you follow bug 269609, you should have seen that Initial code contribution was committed, and that I am currently working on SWTBot build to include the GEF feature. Nathalie tested and provided patches on first versions, so many thanks to her on this side too.

Sea, Text and Fun

I spent last week-end in La baule, having fun to swim, play football and read on the beach.

Photo from Burgermac

Speaking about books, I recently finished to read the great book from Robert C. Martin, Clean Code. One really interesting chapter, is about comments and how they could be dangerous.

I will not speak here about javadoc and API documentation, but all other comments which are used to add tasks (TODO, FIXME), explain an hack or anything else.

The main difficulty is to keep them in sync with the code. As they are not linked to the code they refer, they may move with code addition/refactoring or become inaccurate if the implementation change. Another leak from these comments is that it is difficult to retrieve the author, or to start a discussion from one of them.

In fact, as this kind of comments are meta-data, it could be more logical to dissociate them from code, I mean to store them outside of the code.
We do it of issue tracking (and sometime for tasks), but then comes the problem of integration between tools.

In the last version of OpenOffice, notes are displayed in the margin. I find it very usable.


So here is a quick mockup, of what I would like to have for this kind of comments.

Eclipse and firefox 3.5 on linux

If you updated to the last version of the cool open-source web browser, mozilla firefox, on your favorite linux distro, you may have noticed some problems. For instance, if you opened the welcome view or the help contents, the following exception has appeared :

org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259

This comes from xulrunner 1.9.1 which breaks binary compatibility with previous versions.You need to add to your eclipse.ini file as jvm argument (after "-vmargs") :

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.11

Hope this help.