EclipseCon 2007 Perceptions

Brett

Building Server-Side Eclipse-based Web Applications

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3607

This tutorial (Part 1) gave me a good background on where the OSGi-as-server platform currently stands.

Spring and OSGi combined

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3632

Leo

WTP

The Web Tools Platform provides a framework for extensible editors. The tutorial demonstrated how to add functionality into their existing XML editor using extension points including code completion, coloring, linking, and validation. Many of the other projects are taking advantage of this framework as almost every technology uses xml. The framework allowed multiple content types within a single editor their example was a JSP editor which contained HTML, JSP, and Javascript. From the tutorial it was clear that adding simple functionality was a trivial task and that creating whole new content types was possible.

The tutorial also skimmed on some of the XML model code that the XML editor is built on showing that it is very easy to programmatically modify the XML document in an editor and to listen for model changes. This allows multi-page editors that have a graphical display of the content to easily be implemented. (Which is exactly what we are doing with the adapter editor)

We'll be using this framework for the base of both our ZipTie adapter editor and tools editor.

Whats new in SWT 3.3

• org.eclipse.swt.widgets.DateTime - It's designed to support internationalization, has a nice API, and it looks really cool.
• Search Text field - There is now a flag that makes a Text area be specifically a search area.
• Support for Vista
• Embeded browser enhancements - Mozilla can now be used on all platforms. Also, the https problems have been addressed.
• And some other odds and ends - You can see all of them in the presentation file.

PDT (PHP Development Tools)

The editor is built on top of WTP so there is a nice consistency between the different web tools. I think in a very short time it will be hard to beat eclipse for even basic html editing.

JFace Column Viewer

The JFace team has consolodated shared TreeViewer^? and TableViewer^? code into one framework which makes customizing cell display really easy. You can now just provide a CellLabelProvider^? and it allows you to change any number of things against each individual cell (including text, image, font, background, and some other stuff). Also, one of the guys there mentioned changes to make providing cell editors simpler. It all sounded pretty good.

Dylan