Galileo is out! Get the bits from Intalio now.

Maybe you heard some humming out there, or your favorite place ran out of beer suddenly. That’s a sure sign a new Eclipse release came out.

As an Eclipse member, Intalio provides a page to download the latest Eclipse Classic SDK. Enjoy!

The BPMN modeler is hosted on github. Fork it today.

Oisin hinted he was into experimenting with git:

Perhaps someone could come up with a github mirror of one of the components and we could see how that works?

Come fork me on github! I’ll try to keep in sync with the current trunk, which should work as long as no svn switch happens.

One member of the STP PMC reacted to my call. I am still waiting for others to show themselves and share their wisdom.

Next in line - pushing Babel over to github. Let’s see if Denis, our trusty webmaster, likes it!

Letter to the STP PMC: Please express interest over a DVCS

I sent out an email to the STP PMC yesterday night:

Hi all,

STP has proven to be cutting edge in many ways regarding the Eclipse development process. In particular, we were amongst the first to adopt a Subversion repository.

The reason why we went for those repositories are varied. First, I think most of us acknowledged that CVS was not fitting the bill so much anymore. We were also increasingly using SVN at work, and had gone through the hurdles of mastering it.

Some time passed. git and mercurial came along and revolutionized quite a few things. Just look at github and how the commit rate of rails changed since they moved there (around the 5th minute on this video of the Rails commit history [0])

I opened a bug about the possibility to move to git [1], and a webmaster hinted that supporting git would be considered if a couple of top level projects were asking for it.

That’s why I’m asking you to please cast an informal vote for this move. Please consider also voting on [1].

Thanks,

Antoine

[0]: http://vimeo.com/2979844?pg=embed&sec=2979844
[1]: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=257706

Do you want to see DVCS support at Eclipse ? Please consider writing to your PMC today.

1st BPMN International Workshop

Just saw flying by a call for papers for the 1st BPMN International Workshop. It is happening in Postdam, and is housed by the Oryx team. I would have loved to participate but at that time I will be in Iceland enjoying my honeymoon. Too bad, for once I could have had a jetlag free presentation.

How to add custom navigation links on the wiki.eclipse.org left bar

This proved to be well hidden ; you can add your own links to the left bar of the wiki.eclipse.org website by adding them individually to the project metadata.

leftnavbar-project-metadata

  1. Log into portal.eclipse.org with your committer credentials
  2. Go to your project, and click on “Maintain project meta-data”
  3. Click to edit the “project left nav” property
  4. Now you can enter your link information:
  5. Just save it, and do it as often as needed.
  6. Go to your wiki page and edit it
  7. Add this to the page: {{#eclipseproject:your.project.id}}
    I prefer using a template for this though.

Eclipse committers, turn your NLS warnings on

I just came to realize that it is possible for the Eclipse compiler to track the missing NON-NLS entries, ie it can detect non-externalized strings.

Please consider opening your Eclipse, go to the preferences, then open Java>Compiler>Error/warnings and look for the option “Non-externalized strings”.

Please push that option so that it issues warnings whenever it finds a non-externalized string.

Otherwise, I’ll keep sending people to the cross-project list, or I’ll ask the AC to consider setting the non-externalized string flag as an error when compiling the Galileo RCs. I hope I won’t have to do that.

EMF::acts_as_ActiveRecords

Not sure you followed the latest news about Intalio, Inc. We just rolled out a new website, and we are introducing a new project named Dogfood.

The Dogfood project is exactly what it looks like: we are going to line up and eat our own software until it makes us sick of it. And then we will have some more.

As part of the project, I am tasked to find a way to transform a spreadsheet with some clear conventions into a fully executable process.
Our BPMN model being EMF-based, I showed it to the team, and we feel it’s simple enough that we can generate the XML from the spreadsheet.

How do you generate a EMF-generated model those days ? You would fire up Eclipse, open the diagram editor and modify what you see on screen. Or you would open the default tree editor and make some changes.

Here, we are looking at a different story. Indeed we want to generate our model without Eclipse. And why not without Java.

My idea is to use the ActiveRecord way to generate a model by reading the ecore file(s). The bright part of the idea is that you can have ActiveRecord read the ecore files and load up the classes in memory. There is no actual generation. You change the ecore file, run again, everything is here.

My hope is to be able to do this:

p = new Pool
activity = new Activity
activity.name = "sample activity"
activity.graph = p
other_activty = new Activity
other_activity.graph = p
s = new SequenceEdge
s.source = activity
s.target = other_activity

Did someone think of doing something like that before ? Is there someone crazy enough to read ecore files and create the metamodel inline around ? Does someone know of a way to use ActiveRecords with something that isn’t a DB table ?

jBPM integrates the BPMN modeler

I’m not sure if jBPM uses the code from JWT or STP-IM, but it apparently created a powerful transformation wizard to transform BPMN into jPDL.

I’m glad they chose the BPMN modeler as the base for their work.

jBPM folks, would you like to be listed on our integrators page ? If you like your ride with our project, please consider sending a quote!

The Union of The CheckBoxTreeViewer TreeItems : We shall be disabled together, or die in single combat!

Dear committer, prepare your jFace-foo !

We have a case where we have a CheckBoxTreeViewer that represents a list of elements.

The list in itself is informative. The user is going to be very interested into what is selected, and what isn’t.

It’s certain that at some point he will expand the tree to look at some nodes, come back, etc.

Right now, you cannot disable the checkboxes of a CheckBoxTreeViewer without disabling the whole tree.
So that means that your users cannot check checkboxes (that was the intent), but they also cannot expand the tree.

What if you’d like to disable some checkboxes only ? That’s unsupported too.

Unfortunately, there is no solution for this problem so far. I filed 259092 earlier today to investigate the issue, and it seems you can try to add a listener to revert the check event when the user clicks on checkboxes. Users would still see the items as enabled though, and given the complexity of the interface, adding a tooltip, a new decoration is just going to be confusing.

If you have a spare vote to cast for this bug, a comment, and idea, and ideally a patch, let’s talk about it on the bug!

Open the internal web browser with Firefox (when Safari is default)

Somehow I had the feeling that I was in control when it came to specifying the browser I wanted to open.

Apparently, it’s true for external browsers. For internal browsers, ie those that show in a view or an editor in Eclipse, not so much.

What happens is that the information get lost. You specify the browser type when you do the call to open the browser:

PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getBrowserSupport().createBrowser(SWT.MOZILLA, ...);

But this is simply ignored by the internal editor. Not for too long though, since I attached a patch to 259171 fixes the problem.

Your feedback on this is welcome, of course please feel free to comment on the bug rather than here.