Eclipse – LogSaw Project

On the benefits of the Maven switch

One of the really cool things about Maven is how well-supported it is. Ironically, I realized this while trying to figure out how to solve a bug in Maven-Tycho.
Long story short: My build machine at home is running Windows and that is causing troubles with Tycho doing cross-platform builds on it.

For several reasons, switching the OS is not an option for me and so I went on looking for alternatives. I came across CloudBees, which — as their company name suggests — are offering a bunch of services in the cloud. Most notably, a free Jenkins instance.

The service works suprisingly well so far. And thanks to the power of Maven, setting it up was a breeze. A picture tells a thousand words 🙂

Building instructions updated for Maven-Tycho

I have finally updated the building instructions page for the new Tycho-based build process. There are still some outstanding issues with this new build process though:

p2.inf touchpoints are not picked up anymore
version and build number expansion doesn’t work anymore

But I think these remaining issues should be fixable with reasonable effort.

Migration to Maven-Tycho

Tonight, I have started migrating the build infrastructure behind LogSaw from Buckminster to Maven-Tycho. Please note that you may experience weird problems until all kinks are sorted out. I will keep you posted.

Build infrastructure changes

First of all, sorry for the slow updates! I’ve been quite busy lately, and LogSaw already does pretty much all I need, so the pressure for me to make changes has been quite low. Though, it’s still all alive and development should continue soon 🙂

I have been playing around with Buckminster some more recently, and I ended up making the whole development process alot easier (did I already mention, that I really like Bucky?). So, if you ever wanted to play around with the LogSaw source yourself, but were unsure on how to get started: The new Building LogSaw tutorial should help you to get started.

RCP Product configuration best practice with Buckminster

P2 update should work now, after I have changed the product configuration to follow a standard layout that is recommended by the Buckminster folks.

The configuration is depicted in the diagram shown above. For building, we first import site.feature. This feature in turn includes the product.feature and buckminster.cspex that will contribute the create.product and create.product.zip Buckminster actions.
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Eclipse Helios SR1 out now!

The Eclipse folks have unleashed Helios SR1 to the masses. You can snag the bits right here.

I have also upgraded the LogSaw target platform to point to the new feature versions, and let my Hudson spill out a new build — which is looking good so far 🙂

Speaking of LogSaw, the next public release will probably be dubbed as Release Candidate and is currently scheduled for sometime early October.

Taskbar progress with Eclipse RCP 3.6

A few days ago Eclipse 3.6 aka Helios has been released and after playing around with it for a bit I realized that the update isn’t much of an issue. So, in trunk we are now building against Eclipse platform 3.6 and Buckminster 3.6 in case you wonder.

The only real change I did was enabling the taskbar progress feature that is present for Windows 7 and certain MacOS X versions. That’s pretty neat stuff and really simple to do too if you are working with jobs:
job.setProperty(IProgressConstants2.SHOW_IN_TASKBAR_ICON_PROPERTY, true);