A new Eclipse Corner article has been published that discusses the use of Maven 2 to build Eclipse Plug-ins.

The abstract reads:

In a mature and agile development environment, it is vital that the developers are kept productive and that builds are done continuously and dependably. Eclipse is a great environment for developers and Maven 2 (in conjunction with Continuum or Cruise Control) is a great environment for continuous integration. As with most great software, both Eclipse and Maven 2 tend to be somewhat opinionated and the two don’t always see eye to eye on how things should be done. This article describes how to use Maven 2 with Eclipse in general. In particular we will focus on how to develop, package and test Eclipse plugins using Eclipse (Callisto) and Maven 2 (2.0.4) efficiently.

You can find the article here. Enjoy!

I’ve been focusing a lot of my attention on Eclipse Web Tools over the past few days. I’ve been looking mostly at how one builds servlets, JSPs, and EJBs using Eclipse Web Tools. I’ve been using Web Tools 2.0M4 (along with its specified prerequisites).

Today, I turned my attention to importing existing applications. Eclipse has a feature for importing from a WAR file, but I wanted to determine how easy it is to share the source for a web application created using different tools. I devised a simple test: I created and tested a web application containing a single servlet and JSP using an Eclipse competitor; then I imported the application directly from the file system into Eclipse.

The process was straightforward. I used the “New Project” wizard to create a new “Dynamic Web Project” (aside: see bug 173901; there seems to be buy-in from the committer community that we can streamline a bit by generalizing into a single notion of a “Web Project”). Instead of creating the project inside my workspace directory, I pointed the wizard to the existing directory containing the existing web application.

You can see the “Use default” box is unchecked and that I’ve specified the directory containing my project.

A couple pages into the wizard, I’m invited to specify the “Content Directory” directory. This is where all the metadata and JSPs live; here, I specify the directory, relative to the project root, containing this information. At the same time, I specify the location of the Java source code (also relative to the project root).

At this point, the import process is done. Running the project is a simple matter of highlighting my servlet and selecting “Run As… > Run on Server”.

I’ve captured the process in a screen cam which is available here (you may have to wait for the mirrors to catch up). The whole process takes about a minute.

Scheduling is hard.

I have developed an incredibly deep respect for Richard Gronback. I guess I already had a lot of respect for him anyway, what with the Modeling Project and the GMF thing and all… Scheduling 33 BoFs is hard work. Scheduling 200 sessions must drive you to the brink of insantity.

Unfortunately, I managed to overlap a few BoF presenters in my first crack at the schedule. I believe that I’ve managed to work it out. Still, I imagine that there are other overlaps that need to be dealt with. I know that there is some effort underway to merge a couple of the BoFs which will clear up some space, and hopefully make the sessions a little more lively.

Also unfortunate is the fact that, in the process of rejigging the schedule, I’ve managed to make quite a few open slots on Monday night. I had hoped to leave slots open later in the week, so that we can schedule last-minute BoFs as necessary. I may wind up moving a few of the BoFs from Wednesday night to Monday.

I’m not sure if the BoF schedule made it into the printed materials. If they did, I’m really sorry, Bjorn. Really.

Today I managed to schedule all but one of the proposed BoFs for EclipseCon 2007. As of about an hour ago, there were 33 proposals. The one that I didn’t schedule asked for a room on Sunday night; as of now, I don’t have any Sunday night rooms to book, so I’m leaving it until I find out if it’s possible or not.

I had originally hoped to schedule the sessions based on feedback from the community. It’s a pretty natural thing to schedule popular BoF sessions first, but—with a few exceptions— there was little feedback (thanks for your efforts Jeff and Chris). So, I did the next best thing I could think of. I scheduled them in the order in which they were received. More accurately, I scheduled the Eclipse Project BoFs first in the order that they were received, and then the rest of the proposals in the order that they were received.

I tried to honour timing requests where possible. I also tried to eliminate conflicts between sessions (the Equinox BoF is scheduled to not conflict with the server-side Eclipse BoF, for example). I tried. If I screwed it up, I’m sure that you’ll let me know (do so through EclipseZilla comments please).

I also tried to front load the BoF sessions as much as possible. That is, I tried to schedule as many of them on Monday and Tuesday as possible so that extra slots would fall on Wednesday. This will let us have the ability to schedule (or reschedule) last minute BoF additions right up until the last minute. There’s still space left for more BoFs, so feel free to make additional requests. I’ll schedule them in the order they arrive.

The BoFs may be included in the printed schedules (I’m not sure). They’re being printed sometime tomorrow (Wednesday). I’m not sure what the cutoff time is, but I’ll keep my eyes on EclipseZilla all day and accept/schedule BoF proposals just as lickety-split as I can. If you don’t make it into the printed schedule, it’s not the end of the world; they’ll still be online.

If there’s a serious run on BoF proposals, we’re considering doubling some of them up. There’s a few really big rooms that should be able to confortably hold more than one group (as long as nobody starts yelling). We’ll worry about doing this if demand for BoFs becomes a problem.

See you at EclipseCon.

Today, I spend some quality time getting friendly with DocBook and CSS. More specifically, I spent time tuning an XSL stylesheet to customize the way that Eclipse Corner DocBook-structured documents are rendered, and a CSS to customize the way that they’re displayed. In the grand scheme of things, I rate the enjoyment that I get from this sort of activity somewhere below going to the dentist.

However, I think it’s worth it. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon the new format that I’ve been tinkering with for Eclipse Corner. I’ve only managed to switch over a few of the documents. Tweaking the XSL for DocBook will allow me to move over a bunch of them pretty much in one grand swoop. Thus, while I quite hate fiddling around with XSL documents, the power that keeping the content separate from the presentation provides is appealing.

If you’ve seen Unleashing the Power of Refactoring, then you’ve seen the new format. Like it?

Lawrence and Chris: we’re going to have to update the Authoring with Eclipse article!

We’ve decided to change things a bit this year with respect to BoF sessions at EclipseCon. In past years, we’ve arranged BoFs on-the-fly while at the conference. Your feedback has let us know that this isn’t what you might call “totally optimal”.

Anyway… this year, we’re scheduling them in advance. At least we’re going to schedule as many of them as possible in advance. If space remains, we may schedule a few last minutes while we’re all at the conference.

So… if you’d like to propose a BoF, please do so using the EclipseZilla system. If you’d like to specify a particular date/time/room, please do so in a comment on the record.

If you’d like to see the currently accepted BoFs, look here. If you’d like to attend a BoF, please add your comments (even just a +1 would be great) to the record and we’ll use the comments to gauge interest (which will help us to determine an appropriate room size).

We’re prioritizing BoFs by accepting and scheduling only those proposals made by Eclipse projects (at most one-per-project) until February 9th; after that, we’re scheduling them on a first-come-first-served basis. Actually, that’s not totally true: BoFs will be scheduled based on interest, so make sure that you make your community aware of the BoF proposal and get them to add their “I’m coming” +1 comments.

For those of you who have already been scheduled, let us know (with a comment on your EclipseZilla record) if you think we’ve misscheduled your session. We’ll see what we can do.

Today, we posted “Unleashing the Power of Refactoring” by Eclipse JDT committer Tobias Widmer. In this article, Tobias sheds light on the services offered by the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) and the Refactoring Language Toolkit (LTK) to support automated Java™ refactorings, explains how these services are used by refactorings to perform searches on the Java workspace, rewrite existing code and provide a rich user-interface to present the results of the refactoring. To demonstrate this combination of Java-specific and language-neutral frameworks, this article presents a simple but working refactoring implementation for an ‘Introduce Indirection’ refactoring designed to introduce an indirection method for existing method invocations.

This article was previously published in Eclipse Magazine (which is quite different from Eclipse Magazine).

On a separate but related note, I’ve updated the Eclipse Corner "contributing" page to include the guidelines I discussed in January. I’ve also updated the article template.

You may have noticed that my last couple of posts introduced some podcasts. We’ve gotten feedback from parts of the community that podcasts are a useful medium for disseminating information, so it’s a natural thing for me to start doing.

I thought that I’d get my feet wet by doing a couple of podcasts on EclipseCon, but my longer term intent is to regularly produce podcasts focusing more on Eclipse technology (I’ve taken inspiration from Riyad Kalla’s Callisto series on EclipseZone). Ultimately, these podcasts should become regular features on Eclipse Live. For now, I’m making them available on the Eclipse Resources page (incidently, I’m thinking of renaming this the "Eclipse Library", any thoughts on that?)

I’m going to podcast regularly from EclipseCon. If there are any particular topics or people that you’d like to be the focus of a podcast, please let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Earlier today, I spoke with Rich Gronback about the upcoming EclipseCon 2007 conference. Listen to the Podcast here.

Richard is the Programme Committee Chair for EclipseCon 2007, PMC Lead for the Modeling Project, and Project Lead for the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) Project.