Having had a front seat to the mania that was the SWT v. Swing debate, clearly the broader question of why IBM has almost never seen fit to enhance what was in Java is not a new topic. Doing PDE dev, you are confronted with the obvious need for reflection to do anything serious, after all, this is metaprogramming, ergo, metadata/metamodel is going to be required.

Groovy is a script language which is based on the Java Virtual machine. This article gives a short overview of its functionality. The usage of Eclipse for developing Groovy will also be explained. I use this article as a kind a scatch book to make note to myself. I try to structure this article in a way that I hope it can be useful to others but I do not claim that this is a complete and all including description of Groovy.

Cedric Brun and Laurent Goubet from Obeo are presenting the Eclipse EMF Compare project 0.8.0 features released with Ganymede and the modeling package in a webinar on December 10. There will be a demo showing what can be done with the advanced features and a preview of the 1.0 (Galileo) release demonstrating, among other nice things, the EMF Compare integration with graphical modelers. Register to attend!

Dear Spring Community, I'm pleased to announce that we have released Spring IDE 2.2.1. This version is mainly a bugfix and maintenance release but has some significant user level changes as well. Get more information at the Spring IDE blog Watch out for more tooling related announcements from SpringOne during the upcoming week.

The time has come finally for a release of the Groovy Eclipse plugin. The plugin has been published to the update site. There are a few notes to make. First off there is now refactoring support inside the plugin for your Groovy Code. To see this demonstrated head over to this wiki page. Besides documentation there are some pretty cool flash demos of the features which should entice. Second, the groovy plugin now supports the 1.5.7 version of Groovy.

NetBeans is like lightweight Eclipse, with a couple of very powerful additional features (all out of the box), and it Just Works.

Eclipse has a Plug-in Registry view, which shows the state of all plug-ins in the running instance of Eclipse. But what if you need to analyze a crashed application to see what was deployed on it? Or, like in my case, need to understand a certain bundle dependency in RCP-application that has no Plug-in Registry view?

I have been experimenting with this technology and the main inspiration came from SpringSource's dm Server. Like other OSGi evangelist,I am beginning to see OSGi technology as technology that will transform Java development. I would like it to be more on the enterprise side. In this session, we will see how to build a simple service and consume it.

I’ve been building software for quite a few years now and as software programming techniques have advanced, so has the number of layers. Every once in a while a technology comes along which changes the way we think. Of late I’ve been hearing a lot about how cloud computing will allow us to scale our applications out. I think OSGi can give us similar results at a micro level by removing the traditional boundaries and layers on which our java applications are currently built.

At ESE, I had a nice chat with Chris (actually, I had a lot of nice chats with a lot of nice people - it was quite a challenge to attend any of the sessions), who told me that he was looking into template engines. I leave it up to you to make any assumptions on why he's interested in template engines. I happen to know at least three template engines: Velocity (which I had the joy of using in my active days at AndroMDA.org), the template, erhm, ... mechanism being used in PDE (I once fixed a bug which had been caused by this engine) and - you might have guessed it - Xpand (which I am a committer on).

Never commit files with warnings to SVN. Simple recommendation a lot of people don't follow. Well, you can either do it manually or you can try this simple plug-in that will check files you are about to commit for warnings

Two years ago, I raised a few points about some of the short comings of SWT. Because of it’s native bindings, SWT makes the Java mantra of “write once, run anywhere” quite a bit more daunting. For the most part, SWT’s cross-platform support is actually quite good and it is a decent in terms of performance.

Clips Eclipse (3.2 and above) plug-in This plug-in supports cut/copy/paste and management of multiple snippets of text. * Commands * Copy text selected in text editor as a clip `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+C` * Cut text selected in text editor as a clip `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+X` * Copy Clipboard text content as a clip `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+B` * Paste clip in active text editor `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+V`. The pasted text is left selected. If this command is invoked again within ~1 sec the successive clips are pasted. * Rotate Clips Up `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+9` * Rotate Clips Down `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+0` * Swap top two clips `Alt+Shift+X Alt+Shift+6` * Clips View * Clips View Actions * Paste first selected clip in the active text editor * Remove selected clips * Remove All clips * Rotate Clips Up * Rotate Clips Down * Swap top two clips * Clips preferences page * Automatically create clips after Cut or Copy commands * Number of clips to store Update Site http://clipseclipseplugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ClipsUpdateSite/

If you want to integrate Eclipse BIRT and Hibernate easily, you should read this post.

Do you want to know which IDE is better? well, you won't find it here. But you will find one personal experience regarding Eclipse vs. IDEA, and why I'm happier with the latter one now. Your mileage may vary.

Short tutorial showing how to use jps and jstack tools from JDK.

The Problems view in Eclipse provides filtering and grouping support for quickly navigating large sets of problem markers. If you’re creating custom problem markers, you can register a custom marker group and associate priorities to the different group entries. This will make navigating your custom markers much faster.

Here is a quick glance into what's coming in the production release of MyEclipse 7.0. This release incorporates the fastest and most intuitive way to create, test and deploy RESTful Web Services in the Eclipse space. You'll be able to create a simple service from scratch and test/debug in about 2 minutes.

I am preparing a few talks about dynamic OSGi applications. To get my hands dirty I started a little demo project to showcase different scenarios. That SWT works very well with OSGi is obvious, since Eclipse RCP is based on OSGi. But there are not many Swing based OSGi applications out there. That’s why I started playing around with the dynamic creation and deletion of Swing GUI.

Visual Swing Designer for Eclipse is a GUI designer tool, which consists of a set of Eclipse Plug-ins. It aims to provide a Swing designer for Eclipse for Java desktop developers.

I thought I’d check out the Rich Ajax Platform and see how well my RCP skills carry across. My first impressions are that I’m feeling pretty much at home on the RAP. The vision of single sourcing is upon us and has huge potential to vastly reduce the amount of code we need to write where similar functionality is to be delivered on both a web browser and a rich desktop client.

Eclipse has many ways of doing things. Finding the way that suits you can be tricky. :-) The standard find dialog triggered by Crtl+F is, well, standard. But if you are a keyboard junkie then it kind of gets in the way.

Day One was always going to be a tough act to follow, but once again I had a great day at the conference. As well as meeting even more of the community to discuss the technologies that I use, as well some great ideas for future EclipseZone articles, I managed to fit in some quality talks.

Some things lend themselves to TDD better than others. Code generation, it turns out, scores a 10 on this front. (To some people, it‘s heresy to think that one should favor one approach over another based on the ease of development; I would disagree with this. When a factory tools up to make a product, it‘s all about whether they can get to a production level where they are rolling off the line for an amount where the things can be sold and a profit made. In development, we act like we can‘t really see into that dimension, so there‘s no real reason to try, and oh, yer stuff will be done when it‘s done. Estimates are NOT just about feature density. As a matter of fact, the feature line that each thing must travel will, by definition, impact all features.)

Increase your productivity when developing in Eclipse with plug-ins that reduce the number of applications open on your desktop and make those infrequent tasks easier with wizards.