As you all know in Eclipse 3.4 there is a new Update Manager (more correctly - Plug-in Manager) which is intended to be better.

The update managing side of it is an improvement indeed. But the first thing raised my alertness is there is no place to point where do I want my selected plug-ins to be installed. Well, I thought it’s just a default selection and manually downloaded the plug-ins and dropped them into the famous dropins directory (of course with keeping directory structure). And then after restarting eclipse I discovered that there is no such a thing like hierarchy of plug-ins and plug-in locations at all. That’s too bad.

Now, let’s say you installed all the plug-ins. Then if you want to update them, you don’t have a overall progress bar. And this is a network connection related progress. Isn’t it stupid?

Another glitch: My wireless connection to my neighbor’s hub suddenly aborted. So what does it do? It shows me an error dialog behind the modal dialog of progress information. I’m not even mentioning that there is no retry/ignore options.

Now they say: you can replace the new p2 with the good old Update Manager. But for that you must restore several configuration files from 3.3.2. I understand, this is my stupid mistake that I first completely destroyed my previous installation (I can allow it to myself at home), but it’s still annoying.

Several days ago I was given an additional monitor, and the question of “how to arrange Eclipse view on two displays” was raised. After several tests I made the conclusion that the best way is to stay with my default preferred arrangement, with single difference - to detach and move all the non-editor views to the secondary screen. It frees up editor area and at the same time does not require re-adopting new layout.

The bad news is Eclipse rejects to start up when UltraMon is running.

Today I felt need in simple diagram editor in order to draw a comprehensive flow-chart diagram.

Previously I widely used Dia one, but it was always to painful to achieve acceptable with no constant mistakes and overall creation always took too long.

In the past I also several times evaluated Enterprise Architect, Visio and SmartDraw, but they were too heavy, not only from the package size and memory usage view, but also they required too much time to get used to them, and time is the most expensive resource, as you know.

So, today I’ve restarted the process of finding a simple and good diagram editor, and surprisingly, the first try give me the one, which caused me to stop immediately.

I won’t list here all yWorks‘ yEd’s features and won’t compare it to anything else - Just try it, and I promise: you will be happy. The only thing to add is it’s very fast and light, despite the fact it’s java based.

One of my first assignments at the new company (remember, I left Zend previous week), was analysing existing projects structure. Which means distribution of classes into packages, package dependencies, libraries usage etc.

The results, I would say, were far from being perfect, but I can bet, most of large (and especially proprietary) projects would look similar or even worse. But this is not what I was going to say.

What I am going to say, is for this purpose I evaluated several analysis tools and I want to share my opinion about them.

Here they are (in order of evaluation).

1. Eclipse Metrics(1) (CPL)

Pros: Runs fast, provides tangle detector.

Cons: Dependencies graph is not usable with large projects. No text output of dependencies is available.

2. Eclipse Metrics(2) (CPL)

Pros: no.

Cons: Does not analyze dependencies.

2. JDepend

Pros: Nice and simple UI, fast analysis.

Cons: Provides neither graph nor detailed dependency cycles information, doesn’t provide links to source.

3. eDepend (Commercial)

Pros: Fully featured graphic dependency analyzer, allows filtering on dependency kind

Cons: Commercial, creates disproportedly wide graphs for large projects that are hard to maintain, very slow analyzing and graph creation, doesn’t provide info on elements which depend on selected element.

4. stan4j (Free Beta)

Pros: Fully featured graphic dependency analyzer, very cute GEF based UI, cycles and tangles visualizer, very convenient eclipse integration, report/graphics export ability.

Cons: Does not provide recursive dependency paths on selected elements, does not provide inter-package class dependencies information, non graphical views improvement is suggested.

Conclusion

In the end, in order to perform my task I’ve mostly used stan4j, sometimes switched to eDepend and once or twice times executed JDepend - each of them has its specific advantages.

Dear diary,

I have 2 news for you today.

1. Today we successfully released Zend Studio for Eclipse. My contribution to it, beyond PDT commitments, is Sebastian Bergmann’s PHPUnit testing framework integration plug-in, File Network support, Organize Includes and other parts of Refactoring engine, Code Coverage browser… well, it seems that’s it. Maybe several additional, but minor things. Enjoy, guys. This is really a great (and some say - the best) PHP IDE.
2. Occasionally, these are my last days at Zend Technologies. Since next week I’m starting at Nielsen Online (BuzzMetrics) to do text-mining. If you ask why, the answer is simple - I got bored of Zend, where I spent last 6.5 years of my life, and wanted to do something really new and exciting. I hope it will work For now I’m planning to stay an Eclipse committer and continue to help my brothers at Zend to move on.

Source

Yesterday me and Roy had a brainstorm session on future Zend Neon (Commercial version of PDT) and ATF integration and “occidently” found a way of debugging of an URL with both Zend’s PHPand Mozilla’s JavaScript debuggers in one session.

Surprise! It’s possible with neither patching nor hacking. I’m not going to show the exact steps of this, but the idea is very simple:

As you probably don’t know, to debug URL on a server which has Zend Debugger installed it’s enough to pass several simple parameters with the HTTP request (either in the query string or as cookies), like client IP and port, debug type etc., to start the debug session. Afterwards the debugger contacts the client machine, where a Neon’s Debug Daemon listens for incoming connections. The Daemon then raises up a new Launch Configuration.

When Neon’s Debug URL action is executed, it just appends the needed debug parameters to the passed URL and sends the updated URL either to the browser. Just grab this URL and start Mozilla JavaScript Debug Launch with it!

As the result 2 simultaneous launch configurations will start; the first activated session will be PHP’s one and then, after the browser will start receiving content from the server, JavaScript’s one will come into the picture.

Voila!

Moreover, if you enabled all-pages (cookie based) PHP debugging, it will go further with your AJAX (AJAH/AJAJ) requests!

Now the only problem is you cannot set breakpoints of both PHP and JavaScript types in the PHP source file, since it doesn’t match the final responce which will be passed to the browser, so you should enable the option to suspend the JavaScript execution immediately after it starts to add breakpoints to the responce HTML source.

Today I found that the new version 7.10 of Kubuntu just released.

Since my only Linux machine is in the office and I’m at home today, I’ve started to upgrade the system via VNC. And now I’m wondering will it allow me also to finish with it.

Update: It’s funny, but it didn’t allow me to continue, since some of my old Third-Party Feisty repositories reported 404. Continuing the jorney…

Final: Well, the upgrade succeeded from the 3rd attempt. The system seems working a bit faster, probably because of KDE major upgrade.

Initially I wanted to share with you, my dear blog, a very specific problem I had with running an application (I will certainly do it in the next post), but next I found interesting to talk about all my workstations I had at Zend since day 0 until now

Well, let’s start from the beginning. My first week or two at Zend I worked on a temporary machine with about (I don’t remember exactly) 400MHz Pentium II and ¹/₂Gb RAM. It was more than enough to run HTML-Kit with PHP functions plug-in and Outlook Express. I don’t remember neither her face nor her interior.

Afterwards I inherited my first ThinkPad laptop from my predecessor. It was a good old T21 with 700MHz Pentium III and ¹/₄Gb RAM and Windows 2000. She served me several years, survived a fall and display repair, outlasted hard disk crash, and experienced memory upgrade to ³/₄Gb. My needs grown - I started to run Java based Zend Studio 2.5 and AMP. However, each time I asked our CTO/R&D/IT all-in-one person about CPU upgrade (=new machine), he reminded me that 700Mhz Pentium III is a very powerful processor. It didn’t help though.

Finally somehow one of my frequently shuffling bosses did succeed to swap for an used R51 one with 1.3Ghz Celeron M, 1Gb RAM and 15″ 1K*³/₄K display and Windows XP. The only reasonable advantage of this fright was it’s somewhat faster CPU, while its overweight, size, design and accommodation was a certain downgrade. Anyway, she was with me another 2 years until I met my new and current laptop.

Those days, my boss was the company’s IT manager (I didn’t understand fully correlation between office’s infrastructure and e-Business development and just accepted that castling as a fact), which illicitly purveyed for me the T41 with 1.5Ghz Centrino and 2Gb DDR RAM, which I’m using right now to write this post.

After another year I moved from the e-Business team to Development Tools group and got stationary machine again. Now she runs Windows XP over Intel Dual Core and 2Gb RAM, however about 3 months there was also a OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 on additional hard disk, since I needed to work on Linux related issues under Eclipse IDE.

And after all I gathered another machine with Intel’s 64bit processor, which runs Kubuntu 7.04 alone. With that, I removed my SUSE installation and got a switch to share my display and peripherials between two of my mates.

End.