Phing plugin for Eclipse PDT

I love Ant integration into Eclipse JDT – it provides smart editor, handy auto-completion, and the most important – fully functional debugger.

Recently I have been laboring on porting a deployment system from shell scripts to Phing, a loose PHP port of Ant. And naturally, I miss the above. I still get a little aid from Eclipse – since Phing’s syntax is very close to Ant’s, I can at use Ant editor for Phing files to enjoy property navigation and target integrity validation.

I would be more than happy to announce that I’m going to fill the gap and implement Phing plugin for Eclipse PDT, but unfortunately – I’m too busy and too lazy. On the other hand, if you, my dear friend, will suddenly decide to accept this challenge, I can gladly invest my time in architecture, design, review & testing free of charge. 🙂 Or should I anyway try to start it myself?

Eclipse Committer Emeritus

Time passes and doesn’t wait, and some of the plans don’t be realized, you know. So due to last year inactivity my PDT committer rights were expired and I was appointed with the Eclipse Committer Emeritus status. How sad.

I will still try to not loose connections and relations with my good old friends and will do my best for the project’s success (even if it will be just mental support).

Iterators in PHP

Recently, while playing with Scala/Python/PHP comparative implementation of lazy algorithms (I will hopefully describe them some days later) with colleague and friend of mine Michael Fuks, I sorrowfully discovered that, despite there are several SPL units, which define basic Iterator interfaces and functionality, most of the functionality available for arrays is missing for Iterators.

So I decided to fill the gap and started to reimplement for Iterators the applicable non-trivial array functions and also started trying to simulate iterator comprehension (generator routines) in PHP which is missing there too. For this reason I opened a GoogleCode project of php-iterator-utils – please observe my first experiments here.

In addition I need to notice that latest NetBeans build (6.8) branch has great PHP 5.3 support and feels more stable, fast and functional than Eclipse PDT 😦

Programming in Scala

Got the Programming in Scala eBook. I hope to get time and build an experimental Eclipse Plugin with it.

Eclipse Galileo RC1 Update Manager RT Equinox P2 is still not good enough for me yet

I’ve just failed to install JDT over clean Eclipse Platform RC1 (and this time a bug has been opened):

An error occurred while installing the items
session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.ant.ui 3.4.0.v20090504, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).
Error while loading manipulator.
Error while loading manipulator.

Retrying causes the message immediately. Reverting to the previous installation stage does not help. Restarting does not help either.

It’s very sad that what they call Release Candidate is still rare. Waiting for the release…

Eclipse Maven Integration

Honestly, I was pretty unsure regarding Maven at all. “Why should I port my projects from Ant, where everything is plain, simple and predictable? Single point integration jars are connected to their dependent projects, shared ones are extracted to a Libraries project. Deployment is as easy as checkout and build…” – I convinced myself.

But soon I’ve realized that if our team’s Product is no more than a chain in the string of Products and Components which are unified into the Solution, than why the hell should our code base not to be like that? It’s so nice that lots of Environments has their packaging systems which make installation simple and aesthetic… So if you work in Java and harmony and beauty are not just senseless terms for you, believe me, you should use Maven.

The main Maven’s advantage over Ant is that each dependency, called artifact can be (and commonly is) an independent project with its own history of versions and dependencies. So, if you want your project to be dependent of any library, you can just find it in one of major Maven repositories, add its id to your pom and – voila! it works.

Then, when time comes to deploy your stuff, you pack it and do the same – upload your stuff to another maven repository. Here the cycle closes and the universal happiness has been achieved.

Now, regarding the subject. There are 2 Maven Eclipse plug-ins in the market – m2eclipse and q4eclipse. Both of them recently were accepted as Eclipse native incubation projects as M2E and IAM. I tried them both starting from the second, but as it always happens, the first was the better one. M2E is very stable, comfortable and easy to understand w/o any documentation, while IAM is pretty buggy and unclear.

So I chose M2E to work with and it took just about 3 hours to convert all my projects to poms, configuring all their dependencies and then converting the projects into Maven managed ones. With the last action, all the Eclipse dependencies convert into Maven dependencies, the build is replaced with Maven build and it guarantees that there will be no surprises in production builds. And then you can proceed with LB/Continuum/CC with no time spent to understand why nothing doesn’t get built correctly.

Now what’s remaining is to reintegrate the changes from the sandbox branch and help the team to not be too scared of the changes 🙂

Aptana “steals” PDT code

Long time ago I set up Google alerts to receive new search results related to myself. And today I’ve discovered that Aptana steals “prepares derivative work of“ PDT code.

The only visible “derivation” there is they changed package names, though. 🙂

Why Eclipse Equinox P2 Update Manager sucks

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.

Working with Eclipse on Two Displays – Picture

As I mentioned previously, recently I started to work on two monitors. Here comes the picture (sorry for the bad quality):

Working with Eclipse on two displays

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.