Wayne Beaton's blog

Here’s a great time way to kill an hour… Add a table to your view and neglect to set widths on the columns. Hilarity ensues. Pebkac.

I’ve built two tables over the past two days and both of them are pretty expensive to populate. Leaving the user waiting while you run off and fetch all the data before you can display the table is bad form. To keep in your users’ good graces, consider using the...

The Eclipse workbench contains a collection of stacked views and editors. Some views change their appearance based on the active editor. The Outline view is a good example of this: it changes its appearance (sometimes quite dramatically) when a different editor is activated. The workbench provides a handy mechanism that...

Hey all you folks out there doing Eclipse stuff… The call for participation for OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, to be held July 21-25 in Portland, Oregon ends on February 4th. Last year’s conference was a lot of fun and they love the Eclipse content! Submit your proposals today...

If you’re building plug-ins for the Eclipse platform, you’re more than likely going to need the selection service. The selection service, as you might have guess from the name, takes care of selections in the workbench. Selections happen all over the place. Selecting a file in the navigator results in...

I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu (“Goosy Gander”, or something). There’s some cool new features that I really enjoy, like working Bluetooth™ support. For kicks I turned on all the neat-o gee whiz graphics features (like that über cool compviz desktop cube thingy). Frankly, they...

An upcoming issue of IEEE Software will be discussing Software Development Tools. I’ve been asked by Arthur Ryman, who is one of the guest editors of this issue, to let the community know that they’re accepting article submissions for the issue. Arthur is particularly interested in articles that discuss the...

Normally, I like to make my unit tests so that they do not depend on external things running. As a general rule, I try to write tests that prove that the logic in my code works. While I care that communication between my application and, say, a database or application...

I’ve been having a hard time scaling this year. I’ve received far more requests for appearances than I’ve been able to satisfy. With this in mind, I’m undertaking an effort to update the Eclipse Evangelism site to be more useful (or, to put it another way… useful). I’ve started some...

We’ve just published a new article on Eclipse Corner titled “Defining Generics with UML Templates” by James Bruck: Generics in Java have been around for a while but support for mapping generically specified artifacts in UML to their Ecore representation is new to UML2 2.1. This article will walk the...