Eclipse 101

Developing a community around your project is hard work. But it’s worth it. I think that every open source project dreams of having a community… at least they should dream of it. A community does stuff for you. As you develop a community of users, you’ll get feedback. Feedback is...

I learned a little something about accessibility today while playing with the Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) project’s Java Validation Componentry (Javaco). Actually, I learned a couple of things before I learned the interesting part. First, Javaco currently works on Windows. Try as I might, Linux just isn’t supported. Lesson learned...

I blogged a while back about the potential use of a bus for delivering property change notifications in place of the very common observer pattern. A reader commented that the exact service I need to implement that sort of thing is already available in the form of the OSGi Event...

Elias posted this note on the Riena Dev list. I think it’s interesting reading that deserves a broader audience. So… here it is. — From my personal point-of-view (having done a couple of RCP projects) the benefit of Riena that is important to *me* is, that Riena will provide a...

Occasionally we get questions along these lines on the newsgroups: Does anybody know how X is coded in Eclipse? The simple answer is yes. Everybody can know how it’s coded. The source code is out there for all to see. You have a couple of choices when it comes to...

The first thing I asked about “ 20 Things” was for the pop culture source of the title. Apparently (according to McQ), there is none. The first thing that I noticed about “20 Things” was that there are only 17 things on the list (at least there were only 17...

Over the past week or so, I’ve been discussing how you can make your objects adaptable into different forms. This is great for getting your objects to tightly integrate with existing parts of the Eclipse infrastructure, while remaining loosely coupled with the actual implementation. Loose coupling with tight integration is...

In my last post on the topic, I hinted that adapters can be used to loosen the coupling in your code and then showed how you could use adapters to add even more coupling in your code. Originally, I had a domain class, Person, that knew how to provide information...

In my last installment, I showed how—by making a domain class implement IPropertySource and (naturally) implementing the methods required by that interface—you can expose properties from a domain class that can be viewed and modified by the Properties view. In that posting, I suggested that implementing IPropertySource introduces a tight...