It never ceases to amaze me...

In the relatively small amount of time I have been contributing to Eclipse, I have grown to expect great things from the platform and the community. Yet, on a regular basis (often coinciding with updated new and noteworthy pages), I find myself thinking "Cool, I didn't know you could do that.". I am also constantly astounded by the enthusiasm, support and knowledge of Eclipse committers.

So what has caught my attention this week? Plug-in Spy is the tool I have been searching for since I started working on Eclipse. Now I can instantly determine the class for an open dialog, link to the source and edit it. Another useful feature that I found was the zip file comparator. I'm not sure how long it has been around, but I discovered that you can see the outgoing changes to a zip file in a nice directory structure with changes to individual files shown. I was also reminded of how powerful context launching is when it stopped working.

I stepped into PDE land for a couple of days to work on an import quick fix feature. The enthusiasm of the PDE team is unparalleled. Brian Bauman, along with other committers, made working on it both enjoyable and straightforward. Keep an eye on PDE's M2 new and noteworthy.

It was great to see a community member, Joe Pluta, step forward to help out with our M2 test-pass (there were only two committers available to test this week). I updated our Get Involved web page, and hope that others would consider helping out the debug team (or any other Eclipse team). There are many ways to get involved, including testing for defects, triaging bugs and contributing fixes.

Don't forget that Sept. 28th is Bug Day!

Sharing Makes the World Go 'Round

New API released in JDT Debug project: our Java launch shortcuts (finally).

Gone are the days of having to copy and paste all of our code so that you too can have a base Java launch shortcut with a couple of different 'tweaks'. Now every contributor has the use and extensibility of all of our Java shortcuts (and their parent abstract class) without getting those annoying 'discouraged access' warnings.

There are three classes in total, made available in the package org.eclipse.jdt.debug.launchConfigurations:

1. JavaLaunchShortcut (the abstract parent class)
2. JavaAppletLaunchShortcut (our concrete implementation for launching applets)
3. JavaApplicationLaunchShortcut (our concrete implementation for launching Java applications)

((Debug + Context Launching) >> 32)^2

New to 3.4 is context launching 2.0.

With this new addition people who want to take part in context launching but do not care about IResource's can participate as well. Gone are the days of context launching only working for 'things' that have an IResource adapter. Now anyone, using nothing more than the new API for a launch shortcut, can have a say what should be launched, or what resource should be launched (if any).

The new API in question comes from ILaunchShortcut2 (which surprisingly is an extension to ILaunchShortcut), and provides 4 new methods:

1. getLaunchableResource(IEditorPart)
2. getLaunchableResource(ISelection)
3. getLaunchConfigurations(IEditorPart)
4. getLaunchConfigurations(ISelection)

With these methods contributors can now tell context launching either which resource it should be launching, or what launch configurations it should be launching.