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 ; )

Use AHTIK5217 at checkout! Discount is yours to keep until you cancel or upgrade subscription. Promotion code is valid for next 10 days (will expire November 30th, 2009).

Never heard about TimeGT? Check out timegt.com!

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.

SQL Error: ORA-01440: column to be modified must be empty to decrease precision or scale

There is a way out of this but it is a bit hacky. Let me know if there is a more elegant solution!
Following example also takes care of the situation when your column is not nullable.

alter table MYTABLE add AMOUNT_TEMP NUMBER;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT_TEMP = AMOUNT;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NULL;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=null;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT number(10,2);
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=AMOUNT_TEMP;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NOT NULL;
alter table MYTABLE drop column AMOUNT_TEMP;

Take care!

To find out we (me and Ivar) did a little test-drive using recently announced Glassfish Eclipse Bundle that contains Eclipse IDE with bundled Glassfish J2EE server, optionally JDK and a lot of integrated plugins to get you started quickly.

After cutting out all the downloading, startup etc delays we ended up with a surprisingly short 10min demonstration! It was interesting that we barely wrote any code or XML — see for yourself! Tricky part was initial setup to get all the jars and configurations right — must be followed pretty much the same sequence as in the video!

Ok, here it comes, have fun Probably adding a few annotations and audio would help?

Any feedback is more than welcome!

MU WP was part of the common blogging syndicate that we set up for fun between me, Ivar and couple of others at Techlipse.com.

The relation to Eclipse is simply the fact that big part of eclipse.org is a great example of good test coverage built on top of jUnit. Plus, it was literally pulling my hair out in one of the eclipse-related testing-suites.

I stepped into this a few years ago while bug-fighting a test class that had unexpected initialization.

Pretty sure that many of you know the answer but definitely fun outcome!

As everyone can simply run this snippet yourself I won’t delay approving comments, I’ll just accept them whenever I get a free moment. This comment system here has captcha but additionally all comments must be approved manually.

import junit.framework.TestCase;
public class MyTest extends TestCase {
private static int count = 0;

{ count++; }

public MyTest() {count++;}

public void test1() { System.out.print(count); }
public void test2() { System.out.print(count); }
public void test3() { System.out.print(count); }

}

I’m sure some of us don’t always take this behavior into account

After figuring this out, SPECIAL fun is a bit modified case:

import junit.framework.TestCase;
public class MyTest extends TestCase {
private static int count = 0;

{ count=count*2; }

public MyTest() { count++; }

public void test1() { System.out.print(count); }
public void test2() { System.out.print(count); }
public void test3() { System.out.print(count); }
}

For this last snippet I think without running it you won’t figure it out At least I didn’t..

UPDATE: Decent in-depth hi-tech doc about java init http://www.artima.com/designtechniques/initialization7.html

UPDATE2: Correct answers were 666 and 777.

With Ubuntu the fool-proof steps are:

1. Make sure libsvn-java, subversion and libsvn1 packages are installed
2. Add following to the end of your eclipse.ini file: -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
3. Restart eclipse and make sure JavaHL is selected under Window->Preferences->Team->SVN

By using JavaHL it gets more likely that your svn repo doesn’t get screwed up when using both command-line/shell and subclipse for svn.

Configuring Eclipse to use native SVN client – JavaHL