At the Install dialog uncheck “Contact all update sites during install to find required software”.

Could there be any tricks to publish a plugin in a way that dependencies never trigger contacting all update sites?

Ending this tiny post with a few other update-site-tips:

Tip of the day #2: Fastest way to install from any update site: Help->Install New Software…->[Paste URL to "Work with:" and hit ENTER!]

Tip of the day #3: Fastest way to update a plugin from an update site: Help->About->Installation Details->Update is not the fastest because it still contacts all the other update sites. Possibly faster: Help->Install New Software…->[Paste URL to "Work with:" and hit ENTER!] or select from the drop-down.

If update site was updated while Eclipse was running then click “Available Software Sites”, look up your update site and hit “Reload”. After reload close the Install dialog and open it again.

Success stories like MineCraft keep popping up from time to time. Behind the scenes it’s built with Java. As of today MineCraft has ~24 million registered users, of which ~5 million have bought the game. Most of them with a price of €19.95 (but they did start with a huge discount). In the last 24 hours, 60K people registered, and 8K people bought the game. (Source: http://www.minecraft.net/stats).

We keep hearing that desktop apps are hard to install and maintain. I don’t think Java is a cumbersome environment if 12-16 year boys and girls manage to get tens of thousands MineCraft servers running at their homes. Millions of regular Minecraft players run Java apps without an issue. There are thousands of plugins and mods written in Java for MineCraft server and client. Java is great for that but it’s way too easy to bash the platform if the real problem is usually in the product and distribution!

Let me share with you some of the user conversion stats in one of our own desktop apps, TimeGT. TimeGT is a task and life management app that is written in Java. It has an installer for Windows that includes Java runtime environment so user doesn’t have to install Java by herself. So far 99.1% of users who register their account at the website end up installing the app successfully and logging in with their username. That means essentially that every ~100th user has an issue with the desktop setup. For TimeGT case it’s very likely Mac issue as we don’t provide a .dmg file and running it in Mac is painful.

Eclipse IDE requires Java. OpenOffice requires Java. So does Adobe Photoshop. I believe it’s safe to say that you can still build great and massively popular stuff without falling into building on top of technology which was initially poured over with millions of dollars mostly to sell more ads, own more of your screen estate. Don’t get me wrong.
Of course web apps are perfectly natural for oh so many user cases. I’m still overly excited and thankful that web got a technological and distrubution kick at this scale. Oh. And building beautiful things is so much easier with the web instead of hacking with a Java Swing or SWT UI toolkit. Just know where the fine line is.

The road ahead with desktop and Java

I guess the challenges evolve around maintaining updates and supporting platforms (read: devices).

I’m not worried about the updates. It’s a feasible engineering task. In TimeGT we have automatically pushed updates (yes, requires restarting your app but so does Android and iPhone app!).

But getting your Java app to devices like Android and iPhone is not fun. I’m not sure how it all gets to a sensible place where you don’t have to over-abstract for the sake of single-sourcing yet avoiding idiotic rewriting of app in different languages.

Small footnote on desktop coding experience

While Eclipse remains to be the most popular IDEs around and provides a wonderful Java editor and extending capability, it scares me how its initial advantage of being fast and snappy is diminishing and people keep turning their heads toward vi/vim, SublimeText 2 and TextMate even for Java and Scala. You might think that a real IDE with full AST parsing and class model navigation is required for any reasonably sized projects but I keep seeing people hacking more and more with their text editors. I hope to see a change here. Get an IDE that is as fast for coding as vim.

Eclipse core itself is super fast and gets improved all the time but as with Chrome browser – plugins slow life down. There should be more control on seeing which plugins conserve most resources and a quick method to kill them, just as you close tabs in Chrome.

One project contains many different file types, they must blend into one hacking experience.

Update site URL: http://codehoop.com/bpmn2/

It’s an update site, not a website! See https://github.com/imeikas/BPMN2-Editor-for-Eclipse/wiki for the website.

In addition to fixing the code to support Indigo, also Graphiti framework was upgraded from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0. Update includes a few other minor tweaks, nothing major.

About project future and hosting

As some of you might know BPMN2 Modeler proposal got accepted as an eclipse.org project, named soa.bpmn2-modeler (yay!!!), so the migration is already on the way. But until that gets finished the latest update site will remain available at http://codehoop.com/bpmn2/. Github repo will become inactive as the git.eclipse.org gets up to full speed.

Please note that while Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler offers one of the most complete BPMN2.0 modeling support in the industry, it’s still a prototype and is not recommended for production use!

While on it also added keyboard shortcut so you can switch on-off the wrapping using Ctrl+Alt+W (M1,M3+W in “Eclipse Language”).

Trust me, it’s a useful plugin : )

Latest version can be installed from the update site: http://ahtik.com/eclipse-update/

Word Wrap project site

Thanks to the shortcut I’m not even waiting anymore to have it fixed in the very deep core of the Eclipse platform as the changes would be massive and simply switching it off before launching a debugger is good enough for now.

For a quick background, BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) is the leading standard for business process modeling managed by the OMG. A new version called BPMN2.0 (released January 2011) brings numerous changes to the table, most importantly increasing the consistency and integrating orchestration and choreography in a way that makes BPMN 2.0 a great choice for business process engines.

Over the past few months we‘ve been very excited to work on a new BPMN2.0 Visual Editor for Eclipse. It is free and open source, hosted at github. This github repo is a temporary place and will find a new home soon.

BPMN2 Editor is built on top of the awesome Graphiti modeling framework and behind the scenes uses BPMN2 EMF metamodel.

For more details check out the more detailed post about the BPMN2.0 visual editor by Kris from jBPM.

Check it out, have fun, contribute, report issues and bear in mind that it’s still beta and actively developed ; )

Please make sure your survey is filled in latest for tomorrow, July 16th 19.00 UTC.

See http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/timeline for details.

.. and have fun! : )

Feel free to contact me or any of the program admins in case of any troubles!

Direct link to flyer: Eclipse DemoCamp Tallinn PDF Flyer.

Feel free to share!

Inevitable for growth

At some perspective this has been an inevitable move — code editors have turned into big platforms. They are used for much more than developing pure text-based artifacts. To remain competitive you need to allow the maximum level of integration, openness and visibility. Which becomes impossible without open-sourcing all the core components. Controversially, using a permissive license (ASL, BSD, EPL, LGPL, not GPL) can turn your business into a charity organization.

Commercial offering

IDEA Platform plus Java, Groovy and Scala support are all open-sourced. It looks like IntelliJ is retaining some of the revenue stream by keeping Java EE stack closed-source, calling it IDEA Ultimate and offering it as a commercial product.

The Importance of Java Enterprise (JEE) Tooling

I think IntelliJ decision about keeping EE as a separate commercial product is a very important indicator for the whole IDE marketplace and particularly for Eclipse. Much to my surprise, at the last Eclipse members meeting Q3 call there were some very interesting download stats reported. Eclipse Galileo IDE for JEE gets 41% of the downloads! While Classic and Java combined were 34%! (Off-topic but rcp/plugin edition was 2%).

This 41% of JEE downloads does not include 3rd party distribution providers, many application server vendors have their own bundles with a pre-configured settings (for example GlassFish Tools Eclipse Bundle).

Indication for a better future

IntelliJ move and Eclipse Galileo JEE download clearly demonstrate how important is a good tooling support for Java Enterprise development.

IntelliJ move can also be a sign for Eclipse that there is now a friendly competitor who has put their bet on outperforming current Eclipse JEE feature-set with a commercial offering.

I have no experience with the IntelliJ JEE offering, is it better than the JEE tooling from Netbeans and Eclipse?

SimpleDB Management in Eclipse lets you access SimpleDB to create, edit and view domains, items and attributes without writing a single line of code. Additionally you can use SQL Scrapbook to write SQL select queries with the help of auto-completion.

See http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse for more information and download instructions!

Screencast about the Eclipse Datatools SimpleDB features:

AWS Toolkit including SimpleDB DTP integration is licensed under Apache License 2.0 so it is free to download.