Tag: eclipse

Eclipse Monkey


“Ok, get this – it’s just like Grease Monkey for Firefox… except it’s for Eclipse!”

Now this is cool. I found out about Eclipse Monkey through its name being dropped in a group chat on an DP call and decided to research a little. The article I found is rather old but gives a nice description. Further info can be found at eclipse.org/dash which is the container project.

Think of being able to write scripts that affects functionality across Notes applications in Notes 8. Aspect-based programming for Notes. Hmmmm… It makes my mind wander.

Link to eclipsezone.com: Eclipse Monkey – Now That’s Cool

Imagine combining this with Notes 8!

I was directed to a site for an interesting product by my subscription to Eclipse news. The piece wasn’t on Eclipse per say but on a product based on Eclipse. The product is called Tasktop and looks awesome. There’s a *very* nice Flash demo as well that I recommend you take a look at.

So what’s so special about this? Well besides being a nice tool with some, what appears to be killer functionality, it’s written on the same platform as Notes 8! (that would be Eclipse for those who hasn’t guessed that) It wouldn’t be a monumental task to bring it into the Notes 8 client. How’s that for a context sensitive workbench? Combine it with the workflow of Notes – you could work wonders. Imagine having context tasks in Notes combined with links to activities, e-mails, databases, views, Notes documents, Sametime transcripts, Quickr documents, documents on file shares… It makes my mouth water!

Wow!

IBM should definitely pick up on this. That would be nothing like my dear old Notes client! It would be Notes on steroids!

P.S.: I know I went a little overboard with the exclamation marks! 🙂

Caveat when converting an Eclipse Java project to a plug-in project

Based on some advise I got in the “Meet the Developers” lab at Lotusphere I converted a Java project to a plug-in project in Eclipse today. This will make it easier to manage my dependencies instead of manually having to export the model classes as a jar and including that. I tried it before but it didn’t work. Today I found out why.

The conversion via right-clicking and choosing “Convert Projects to Plug-in Projects” (in the “PDE Tools” section) went fine but afterwards the classes from the plug-in wasn’t found by my sidebar plug-in in Notes 8. Compilation in Eclipse went fine.

The issues turned out to be caused by Eclipse not automatically adding the compiled classes to the plug-in. To solve this I had to open the manifest (MANIFEST.MF), switch to the “Build” tab and in the “Runtime Information” section add a library named “.” (yes a period) on the top left and the source code folder I wanted to include on the top right.

Once I did that everything went smoothly.

Eclipse Version Qualifiers

When developing plug-ins and features in Eclipse you need to change the version number to force Notes 8 to redownload and install the feature/plug-in. To make this easier you can use version qualifiers – this will make your life much easier. For more info see Using Version Qualifiers. Thanks to Pierre Carlson from IBM.

Sick of java.awt type ahead suggestions in Eclipse?

Then you need this little handy tip. There are many classes with identical or similar names in the java.awt and the SWT widget libraries. Having to distinguish between the package names in the type ahead dropdown is a pain and lead to wrongful imports so do yourself this favor:

  • Open Eclipse
  • Select Window/Preferences from the menu
  • Expand Java/Appearance/Type Filters from the menu on the left
  • Click the “Add package” button, enter “java.awt” (without the quotes) and click OK
  • OK your way out

This will make Eclipse remove any matching classes from the java.awt package from your type ahead list. Very nice…

And while you’re there you might want to add lotus.domino.cso, lotus.domino.local and lotus.notes to the list as well as all Domino programming is done through the lotus.domino package.

Eclipse PHP tooling

The Eclipse Foundation releases PHP tooling.

Quote: “Eclipse has long been enriched by the wide number of programming languages supported” says Mike Milinkovich, general director of the Eclipse organization. “The release of PDT 1.0 is great news as it will allow the estimated 4.5 million PHP developers to begin using Eclipse-based tools and greatly expand the entire Eclipse community.”

Discovering Notes 8: More spill-over from Eclipse


What’s going on? Well that’s the question… Did you notice the animated gif in the lower-right corner of your Notes 8 client that looks like this:

It is the new progress tab and by clicking on the orange ball you can get the progress bar to display in full screen mode like shown below. The cool thing is that you can see all the different operations that may be occurring at any one time. In this example below I’m only replicating but you can see that I just finished copying a database as well. In previous releases you only had the one progress bar at the bottom which meant that you couldn’t see simultaneous operations.

If you click “Show” in the upper right corner of the tab, select Preference there’s even more fun to be had… 🙂