2009

2009 is ending, time to look back at a productive and very interesting year.

As mentioned in earlier posts, I'm working on a software called Scodi which is currently released as version 3.4.x.
For the next version 4.0, we dumped all the old code and rebuild the whole software using new and "fancy" technologies.
Version 3.4 was a fat RCP client, version 4.0 will be a server-client application.

That said, I had the pleasure to integrate a lot of amazing frameworks and APIs into our new software.

EMF to model our business objects, Teneo and Hibernate to persist those objects.
The Spring framework to create our beans and register some of them as OSGi services, Riena to publish them for remote access.
Apache Jackrabbit to store and version some of our data.
jBPM to handle workflows (e.g. data that is being committed needs to be reviewed by certain users) and a Mylyn connector to handle those user tasks.

This November I took a look at GMF to build our Process Flow designer, the designer itself will be developed by another company.

Towards the end of this year I cleaned out our RCP client to make it RAP ready as we have a web part of our software.
The EMF based UI framework which I built last year, uses RCP and SWT per default. The framework works on the web now including databinding, field decorations and such. RAP is great and single sourcing a blessing :-).

Using all these technologies I reported about 30-40 bugs I hope to soon find more time to contribute back to the open source community. My project on sourceforge.net "workreporter" didn't get any commits this year, I was fully concentrating on Scodi.

It was a busy year and I'm looking forward to release version 4.0 in 2010.

Override Eclipse Key Binding

A few weeks back is was struggling with an Eclipse key binding problem. I had to override the CTRL+S binding. Since I had my own "org.eclipse.ui.bindings" extension, I keept on getting conflict messages (no wonder).
So I thought I'll make a post as personal reference and maybe it helps some other developer.

This is what I did in ApplicationActionBarAdvisor.makeActions().

IBindingService bindingService = (IBindingService) window.getService(IBindingService.class);
bindingService.addBindingManagerListener(new IBindingManagerListener() {
   @Override
   public void bindingManagerChanged(BindingManagerEvent event) {
       BindingManager manager = event.getManager();
       for (Binding binding : manager.getBindings()) {
           ParameterizedCommand command = binding.getParameterizedCommand();
           if (command != null && ActionFactory.SAVE.getCommandId().equals(command.getId())) {
               manager.removeBinding(binding);
           }
       }
   }
});

IWorkbenchAction saveDocumentAction = ActionFactory.SAVE.create(window);
saveDocumentAction.setId("saveDocument");
saveDocumentAction.setActionDefinitionId(SAVE_DOCUMENT_COMMAND);

register(saveDocumentAction);

SWT instead of AWT packages

Today I got annoyed using eclipse code completion to add a KeyAdapter on a SWT component. Instead of adding the SWT KeyAdapter (since it's a SWT widget), eclipse suggests the AWT KeyAdapter before the SWT KeyAdapter. The result of this is that I often choose the wrong one.
Same thing with other classes like KeyListener, MouseListener...

So I was looking for a solution, eclipse should ignore the java.awt package.
I have not found a way to handle this for the whole workspace using preferences.
I now exclude the java.awt package in all my UI bundles from their Java Build Path.

Maybe you have had the same "trouble" and never thought about getting rid of it :-)