I’ve written about Yoxos before. Yoxos, brought to us by the good people at Innoopract, is one of a handful of Eclipse distributions. They have a pretty cool Ajax-infected website that lets you specify the Eclipse components that you need (which they refer to as a scenario) and then builds an Eclipse image containing all those components (along with prerequisite components).
The Yoxos Eclipse distribution contains all plug-ins from eclipse.org plus other carefully selected third party plug-ins. This is pretty cool stuff all by itself.

They’ve launched a new partner programme that aims to increase the size of their plug-in catalogue while providing services to both the plug-in providers and consumers. They perform quality analysis on the plug-ins and provide feedback to the providers. This has obvious value to both the provider and the customer. Plus, they have a cool logo that plug-in providers can use to direct consumers to a fully-functioning Eclipse scenario that includes their plug-in(s).

If you’ve got plug-ins that you want to put to work, you should probably check out the partner programme. That, and you really should also register your plug-ins on Eclipse Plug-in Central (EPIC).

BTW: while you’re at the Innoopract web site, be sure to check out the RAP demo.

I’m officially declaring my attempts at keeping Wednesday night EclipseCon 2007 BoF slots open as an abysmal failure; it seems that an awful lot of folks wanted their BoF sessions on the last night. I had originally intended to keep Wednesday night as open as possible so that we could schedule some last minute sessions, but that’s just not in the cards.

You’ll probably notice—when you’re looking over the printed schedule—that a lot of changes have occurred in the BoF timings. Since the schedule when to press, I received a flurry of emails informing me that I’ve mis-scheduled a variety of BoF sessions because BoF XYZ really should happen after session ZYX, or that Mr. Jones needs to be at three different BoFs and two of them are scheduled at the same time, or whatever. These are all reasonable constraints that—in my defense—weren’t actually specified when the BoFs where proposed.

Next year, I intend to make it more clear that we do try really hard to meet scheduling constraints, so long as they’re actually specified. A simple comment to the effect of “Mr. Jones needs to be a session XYZ and ZYX” goes a long way to helping us schedule these things as conveniently as possible.

There are still slots available on Monday and Tuesday nights. If you want to schedule a BoF, now would be a good time. Use EclipseZilla to make your proposal. And be sure to list any constraints you have in the comments…

For my money, there just hasn’t been enough talk about Mylar lately. And I think I understand why. At least for me, Mylar has become such an integrated part of my workday, that I don’t really think all that much about it. It’s the same for the Java Development Tools (JDT): I really don’t think about them much, I just use ‘em. They just work for me, and do a great job. It’s only when I take a step back and force myself to think about what Mylar or the JDT are doing that I start to get that overwhelming sense of amazement.

It’s time to think a little more about Mylar. A while back, I wrote an article titled “Five Reasons to Love Mylar” based loosely on a series of blog entries ([1], [2], [3], [4], and [5]) I wrote a while futher back. The article is available on Eclipse Developer’s Journal.

Early in article, I try to make the point that Mylar takes the notion of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to the next level by actually integrating the developer into the equation. My intent was to suggest that before Mylar, IDEs were concerned exclusively with integrating tools and making them available to the developer; and that now, with Mylar, the integration extends to include the developer. I’m not sure if I managed to get the point across, or if I just left people scratching their heads. Judging from the rather large number of reads and lack of any feedback, I have to assume that either (a) you get it, or (b) you’ve been stunned into silence.

Anyway, if you’ve seen the article, I hope that you enjoyed it. If you haven’t seen it, you really should go read it. I’ll be testing your knowledge of the content at EclipseCon…

I recently added Korean to the list of languages we have Eclipse Resources available in. In addition to Korean, we have resources in English (of course), French, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. I’m pretty excited by the prospect of having some Eclipse Corner Articles available in Korean as well. We have at one in the pipeline now: Yang Seok-Ho has translated the “JET Tutorial Part 1 (Introduction to JET)” into Korean.

The problem that we have with translations is that we have basically no editorial capability in languages other than English (it could be argued that we have limited editorial capability in English as well, but that’s a whole other story). I’d love to be able to make translations into other languages available, but am fully dependent on the community to to ensure that these translations are correct. With the possible exception of French, I’m not even all that able to determine if the character encoding is even correct.

My more immediate problem is that I need some Korean readers to review the translation we have in the pipeline. More generally, if you want to provide a translation of an existing Eclipse Corner Article, or contribute an entirely new Eclipse Corner article in a language other than English, please feel welcome to do so. And, if you stumble across a translation in bugzilla that needs reviewing in a language you can read, please add your comments.

In this podcast, Ed Merks, Project Lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) Project, discusses the work being done on the latest release of EMF to support Java 5, along with other EMF topics.

The Eclipse Corner Article titled “Contributing Actions to the Eclipse Workbench” has been updated by Ketan Padegaonkar.

Yang Seok-Ho has translated Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux’s “Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications” into Korean. This book is considered by many to be a must-read resource for anybody building applications using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

You find the translation here. The original is here. A review of the book (written by a fantastically handsome and charismatic evangelist-type) is here.

Additional RCP resources can be found on the Eclipse Resources page.

I’ve been playing with Jigloo this evening. I noticed earlier today that the entry on EPIC for Jigloo claimed support for GroupLayout, so I decided to take a closer look.

The current release version, 3.9.5, supports the org.jdesktop.layout.GroupLayout that you can find as part of the Swing Layout project. As I understand it, this is essentially the incubator version of the layout that has since moved into Java 6 and become javax.swing.GroupLayout. There is a milestone build of Jigloo, 4.0M1, that supports both the Java 6 version and the Swing Layout versions of the layout manager (there’s a checkbox on the “Code Generation” page of the preferences).

I’ve been playing with it for about an hour and it works well. I’ve used it to import an existing user interface created with another IDE and it worked great. Jigloo didn’t even complain that I neglected to include the corresponding .form file. And, of course, you can make changes in the Java source editor or the visual assembly area and it does the right thing.

It’s not perfect (it seems to lose right-alignment layout information when you make changes), but it’s quite good for a milestone release. Watch the CloudGarden forums for the availability announcement of milestone 2 (4.0M2) sometime in the next couple of days.

There’s a cool button in the outline view that switches a layout between Swing and SWT. I’ve only clicked on it once and the results weren’t pretty (no GroupLayout in SWT), but I’m definitely going to spend some quality time trying to sort out how useful this can be for migrating existing Swing-based user interfaces into RCP components. I’m getting that excited tingle…

Jigloo isn’t your only choice for editing GroupLayouts. WindowBuilder also provides this functionality.

Jigloo is free for non-commercial use.

I’ve just posted an update to the article “Implementing Model Integrity in EMF with MDT OCL” on Eclipse Corner. The article has been updated for EMF 2.3/Java 5.0 and MDT OCL 1.1.

You may recall a post a while back about a new and exciting blog titled “Eclipse Sucks”, hosted by a German post-graduate student Hobel. If you followed his blog, you’d have noticed that it started out very negative of Eclipse, but appeared to get warmer over time. Now the blog has totally disappeared.

My glass-half-full personality wants to believe that we’ve reached him—that he’s seen that Eclipse ain’t all that bad afterall—and took down the blog. We may never know for sure. But I like to think that we’ve won him over.

Hobel, if you’re out there… come toward the light.