Tag Archives: Eclipse

Bazel Eclipse Feature is here!

Are you using Bazel as a build system and doing Java development? Do you want to give the Eclipse plug-in for Bazel a try?

I’ve spend the last couple weeks reworking most of the plug-in to better support Bazel development. It’s approach isn’t very different from the IntelliJ plug-in, i.e. it runs Bazel query and performs Bazel builds with aspects to obtain project and classpath information from Bazel. With that information it creates projects in Eclipse. It also uses project views (.bazelproject) to configure what’s visible in Eclipse.

However, there are a few differences compared to the Bazel IntelliJ plug-in, which I’d like to highlight.

  1. It uses Eclipse projects to map targets so the classpath is really scoped to the classpath of the targets.
  2. It allows for some flexibility how targets are mapped to projects – you can have one project per target or one project per package.
  3. Because of Eclipse auto-build feature of individual Java source files HotSwap just works and is fast.

Documentation is here. The update site is https://opensource.salesforce.com/bazel-eclipse/latest/.

Oh and there is a preview release of a VS Code extension using the same feature to setup the Java Language Server in VS Code.

Bringing the Eclipse IDE forward

How do we do it?

We tax for committership!

Seriously?

Let’s charge 300 bucks!

Nooooo!

On one hand, the investment into the Eclipse IDE of existing, long-time contributors is declining. There might be plenty of reasons for that. But over time, this decline in investment has become visible to the users of Eclipse – developers that use it every day to get their job done. Personally, I’m missing innovation in things that really makes up a great IDE. Well, some might say that innovation happens in the web these days. Desktop IDEs are boring.

Really? Because on the other hand, there are many companies out there which are spending quite a bit of money on licenses for commercial desktop IDEs every year! Thus, I’m wondering if some of those companies would rather spend a similar amount or a bit less on Eclipse? Do you care about developers? Imagine there is a team of experienced people with a great vision on the Eclipse IDE available that is seeking for funding. Imagine that with your funding, you can not only contribute to a sustainable future of the Eclipse IDE but also participate in making decisions on how this future should look like. Now I’m telling you, that you don’t even need to hire developers for that!

This idea of leveraging an industry working group for bringing the Eclipse IDE forward has been circulating around for some time now. I finally sat down and put together a proposal for an Eclipse IDE industry working group.

Industry working groups at Eclipse are an easy way for companies to efficiently work together on a common goal. I’m looking for feedback and interested parties! Does that idea sound interesting? What aspects of the proposal do you like and which not at all? How much would you be willing to spend? What kind of participation do you like? What is missing and should be covered?

There are plenty of questions. Please don’t hesitate and reach out to me (@guw or gunnar at wagenknecht dot org) or subscribe to the ide-dev mailing list and join our discussions! There are also two interesting sessions at EclipseCon Europe that you should join: Making the Eclipse IDE fun again and an Eclipse IDE BoF.

Eclipse at FOSDOM 2012

It’s my first out of two days at FOSDEM 2012. It took us quite a ride to get from the hotel to the ULB. We tried to order a taxi but the people at the reception told us that it would take at least 1.5 hours till a taxi arrives. Luckily, Mike and Andrew know someone who has been at FOSDEM a couple of times before. He guided us safely to ULB using a combination of walking, metro, tram and more walking.

We quickly setup an Eclipse stand over there and Mike, Andrew and myself are showing demos and talking to people. BTW, thanks to the FOSDEM organizer to have it well prepared so that we just needed to setup our banner and our notebooks for the demos.

So far we have a great mixture of questions from developers using Eclipse for their day-to-day work, programming questions of Eclipse plug-in developers and people interested in Orion. There are also people stepping by that have no questions – they introduce themselves as happy Eclipse users and appreciate what the committers of the various projects have built over time. Thanks for those kind words folks!

 

Jena Demo Camp will be in Hamburg

Well, the room is called Hamburg. The city is still Jena (more about Jena). We’ll start at 5pm and it looks like that there’ll be some awesome demos. It also seems that Runtimes is the hot topic. Together with modeling and tooling demos this looks like an interesting mix. Personally, I can’t wait for the Stammtisch.

Eclipse Demo Camp Jena
June 22nd, 5pm
JenTower, floor 27, room Hamburg

Yes, on the day of Indigo GA!

Interested? Register today and we’ll see us next Wednesday. I think there is still room for one or two interesting demos. Thus, if you are developing some cool Eclipse technology or product that you’d like to showcase just add it to the list on the registration page.

See you there!