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[ecf-dev] ECF press in EclipseSource
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Hi Folks,
See article below for some ECF press in Eclipse Source.
FYI.
Scott
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: EclipseSource: ECF Is Spreading the News
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:04:08 EDT
From: BZ Media<news@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: ES BZ Media
<Reply.73089597.12912.slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.ESLIST_2005@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Issue 56
July 5, 2007
» EdNotes: Wanna Be a Part of It?
» Upcoming Events
» Europa Release Marks Major Eclipse Overhaul
» Eclipse-a-Palooza
» EPICenter
» Tips: Combining Field Editors and SWT Widgets in
Preference Pages
EdNotes
ECF Takes Flight With Europa
After more than two years in incubation, The Eclipse Communication
Framework project has earned its wings; the project took flight with
Europa's 21 projects last week.
According to project lead Scott Lewis, functionality included in version
1.0 will permit developers to add chat and instant messaging features to
their Eclipse and RCP applications using a number of protocols,
including IRC, Yahoo and Jabber's XMPP. "For users, that's the main
thing," said Lewis. "Most developers use IM quite a bit, and having it
integrated within Eclipse presents an advantage."
Additional capabilities in the ECF base package include file transfer
over HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent protocols, and ECF Generic, which Lewis
described as a protocol for implementing baseline clients and a server.
"It's a completely open publish-and-subscribe model that people can add
onto." Also added in time for Europa is support for Eclipse's Hyperlink
Detector. "You can embed links in Java or text to XMPP or Yahoo URLs, so
you can say to people 'click here to IM me,' for example," he said. In
preparation for Europa, Lewis said he's been spending much of his time
"hardening the APIs and adding documentation."
The benefits of ECF to commercial developers should be obvious. But
perhaps more subtle is the payback to enterprise developers building
apps for use within their own company. "Even within an organization,
it's helpful to have developers coordinate together more tightly than
checking code into a repository." Capabilities planned for the near
future include real-time shared document editing, for example, similar
to Mac OS X's SubEthaEdit.
"There is a place for ECF to be used within an organization that might
even already have a set of tools and conventions and might want to take
this and improve their collaboration." One of the primary benefits of
the framework, according to Lewis, is in its modular design. "We're
defining all the APIs with careful separation between each API and
between the provider implementations underneath." This allows included,
third-party or proprietary protocols to combined in any combination, he
said.
"That's important because people might want to use their existing "[IBM
Lotus] Sametime" or other protocol [for example], because they already
have apps that run on those things and they can just build ECF on top
and keep interoperability." The project also conforms to the OSGi
component model, when possible. "The presence API is separate from the
call API and from file transfer API. They're not bound to any particular
protocol, giving developers the ability to build interoperable apps
within Eclipse RCP."
Some of the features not included in ECF 1.0 can still be taken for a
test drive. Lewis said a bulletin board API, for example, permits apps
to communicate directly with newsgroups, discussion forums and the like.
"So you can programmatically interact with a BBS to post, search and
call up other parts of the BBS," he said, adding that initial support
will be for the phpBB open-source forum project. "You could take a
discussion from within an IM client and post it to a forum," he said,
for example. Lewis invites developers to visit the ECF Extras page at
Oregon State University for Skype and Yahoo providers and other add-ons
under development.
What more can we do? SEND FEEDBACK
-Ed
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News
Europa Release Marks Major Eclipse Overhaul
By Alex Handy
The Eclipse Europa simultaneous release, which includes version 3.3 of
the Eclipse IDE and updates to 21 projects, was set to be offered to the
public in late June.
Eclipse IDE 3.3 includes a new keystroke-based way to step through
method collections, new ways to handle unresolved names, and the ability
to browse objects in a Java Virtual Machine when running Java SE 6.
But with 21 companion projects included in part of Europa, it's a sure
bet that your favorite tools are back again with new capabilities. While
standbys such as the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)
suite and the Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) have returned
with support for Windows Vista and Java SE 6, new tools are also on
board with their own bells and whistles.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, noted
that two of the newest Eclipse tools have brought some of the most
interesting updates to the Europa release.
The first, a workflow tool formerly known as Mylar, has been renamed
Mylyn to avoid trademark issues. With the release of Mylyn 2.0 as part
of Europa, the tool enhances its ability to view workflows as tasks.
"This is one of the really interesting projects at Eclipse for the
individual Java developer," said Milinkovich. "It gives instant access
to a task UI and integrations with tools developers constantly use, like
Bugzilla and Jira."
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Another new unit of the Europa release, the SOA Tools Platform, is
arriving just a few months after it was first announced. "It's a pretty
interesting feature set for a 1.0 release," Milinkovich noted, adding
that it offers JAX-WS service development, a BPM diagramming tool and
BPEL editing tools as well.
Of course, Java doesn't get all the love in Europa. Another project
that's first seeing the light of day in this release is the Dynamic
Language Toolkit (DLT). While this toolkit is specifically designed to
allow developers to add new dynamic languages to the Eclipse IDE as
plug-ins, it also includes two sample language implementations for Ruby
and TCL.
The trackbed of Eclipse has been overhauled for this release as well.
The OSGi Alliance's new Equinox technology has been integrated into
Eclipse, to the benefit of the rich client platform. For Web
programmers, the Web Tools Platform (WTP) can now manage Tomcat work
directories from inside Eclipse. Additionally, the WTP now includes a
visual page editor designed to ease the development of JavaServer Pages
(JSP) and HTML.
The BIRT reporting suite has also been updated. "We think this is a
great project that offers a lot of functionality to Java developers,"
said Milinkovich. "There are several different new chart types. There's
a new dynamic cross-paths report. You can actually have Word and Excel
as output formats for your reports, now. You can use Web services as
data sources. They've done some work on making it easier to deploy and
integrate BIRT with server applications, too. The days of hand-coded JSP
for reporting is coming to an end with the way BIRT is progressing."
And, keeping up with the times, all portions of the Eclipse Europa
release are now compatible with Windows Vista. Developers hoping for
some simplicity in the install process will also be happy to hear that
the Eclipse Foundation has streamlined the packaging of the IDE.
Specifically, there will be four packages available: one for Java
developers, another for enterprise Java developers that includes Java EE
support, a third for C/C++ developers, and the last, for RCP and plug-in
developers.
Eclipse's Europa release can be found online at www.eclipse.org. The
software and all of its plug-ins and frameworks are free and open source.
SEND FEEDBACK
Eclipse-a-Palooza
In the wake of the major Eclipse release last week, this issue's
Eclipse-a-Palooza links you to some of the major coverage and analysis
of this announcement. SD Times' news report, from Alex Handy, was
reprinted above, but you can also link to it at
www.sdtimes.com/article/story-20070701-01.html.
» Joe Niski from the Burton Group
» Michael Cote from RedMonk
» Alan Zeichick from SD Times
» Darryl Taft from eWeek
» Paul Krill from Infoworld
» Plus, a running list of Europa reviews maintained by the Eclipse
Foundation
SEND FEEDBACK
EPICenter
An update on recent activities at Eclipse Plug-in Central.
Bold type denotes commercial products.
Most Active Plug-ins from the Past 24 Hours.
eUML2 free edition
312
MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench
309
Bytecode Outline
161
WindowBuilder Pro - SWT/Swing/GWT Designer
100
HiberObjects
99
Tiny Eclipse
82
Eclipse SQL Explorer
81
PyDev - Python Development Environment for Ec...
75
CDT for Windows
67
Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder
65
Oxygen XML Editor and XSLT Debugger
55
Subversive - SVN client
54
EclipseUML free edition
51
J2EE Spider
49
GWT Designer
45
SEND FEEDBACK
Tips
Combining Field Editors and SWT Widgets in Preference Pages
By Dwight Deugo
In my last article, I discussed how to use Eclipse's specialized
FieldEditors, such as a StringFieldEditor, in your preference pages to
collect user preferences. While the list of subclasses of
org.eclipse.jface.preference.FieldEditor is extensive, providing many
types of field editors you can use to collect preferences such as paths,
colors, or integers, they won't handle every situation.
A simple example is the need of a button that, when pressed, initiates
and tests a connection from a URL a user has provided as a preference.
You have to position the SWT widgets in the appropriate positions within
the preference page and handle the corresponding widget events when they
occur. Let's see how this process actually works.
The first step is to look at the behavior your preference page inherits.
In all of my previous implementations, my preference pages inherited
from the class org.eclipse.jface.preference.FieldEditorPreferencePage.
In particular, we need to look at the method createContents(..). If we
look a level higher in the hierarchy, we see that this method is an
abstract method in the class
org.eclipse.jface.preference.PreferencePage. Therefore, we'll either
have to make use of the inherited behavior or create it ourselves. The
inherited method is as follows:
protected Control createContents(Composite parent) {
fieldEditorParent = new Composite(parent, SWT.NULL);
GridLayout layout = new GridLayout();
layout.numColumns = 1;
layout.marginHeight = 0;
layout.marginWidth = 0;
fieldEditorParent.setLayout(layout);
fieldEditorParent.setFont(parent.getFont());
createFieldEditors();
if (style == GRID) {
adjustGridLayout();
}
initialize();
checkState();
return fieldEditorParent;
}
The method simply creates a Composite object and uses a GridLayout for
it. It is this composite that is returned, saved in the instance
variable fieldEditorParent and ultimately used whenever a new
FieldEditor is added to the preference page using the addField(..) method.
How do you hook into this process in order to add custom widgets? In
your preference page class, implement the method createContents(..) as
follows, letting the inherited createContents(..) method do its work
first and then adding your corresponding widgets to the Composite object
it returns.
In the method below, you can see the super invocation, the adding of a
new SWT Button, the Button's setup, and then the final return of the
control, which is the original composite, to the method that invoked the
createContents(..) method in the first place.
protected Control createContents(Composite parent){
Control control = super.createContents(parent);
Button button = new Button((Composite) control, SWT.PUSH);
button.setText("Connect");
button.addSelectionListener(new
ConnectButtonSelectionListener());
return control;
}
The result, along with any field editors added in the
createFieldEditors() method, is as shown in Figure 1. Knowing the
execution path will enable you to cut out the creation of FieldEditors
completely, if you so wish.
Moreover, looking at the implementation of
org.eclipse.jface.preference.FieldEditorPreferencePage should also give
you some ideas as to how to change the layout manager from a GridLayout
to something else—just check the style instance variable. While field
editors will get you most of the way, on the rare occasion when you need
to place and handle your own widgets are their events, you're now up to
the task.
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