3.6 PDE plan ideas

We have updated our PDE 3.6 plan ideas page here : http://wiki.eclipse.org/PDE/Plan/3.6 so check it out...feedback is always welcome.
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Breakpoints Not Being Hit?

Just wanted to bring attention to an issue discovered with Sun’s recently released 1.6.0_14 virtual machine. Breakpoints are unreliable - i.e. do not always suspend execution. The problem occurs on Windows and Linux platforms. The associated Eclipse bug is:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=279137

At this point, it appears to be an issue with the VM rather than Eclipse. The workaround is to use the 1.6.0_13 virtual machine.

Target Platforms in 3.5

What a milestone for PDE. Chris has been blogging away about things in M7, and I wanted to talk a little more about the target platform changes coming in M7.

When I started work on PDE UI, this is all I knew about target platforms...


Talk about button overload. So many features, none of which I ever had touched as a debug plug-in developer. I didn't like the UI, I was confused by the 'model' that backed it, and touching anything on that page seemed to break someone (or everyone).

Fortunately, in 3.5 the PDE UI team: Chris A, Darin W, and myself along with Ankur, Ben, Simon and other contributors, had the opportunity to make it better.

The fundamental change is that the preference page is no longer about crafting a target platform. It's about choosing the target you need. There are many new features available and there is a proper model (provisional api as well) so interacting with targets programmatically is much easier.

This was the first time I have written a significant UI component in Eclipse. It has been quite the learning experience and I have even more respect for the platform UI folks and those involved with the p2 UI (which has developed into an excellent experience in 3.5). I received a lot of feedback along the way and have made every effort to develop a UI that respects legacy functionality, simplifies the story while supporting power users, and adds useful eye candy without button overload.

In the future expect even more information to come out about how to work with target platforms, talk about some new ideas we are considering, and posts about some cool features you may not notice at first glance (like p2 provisioned targets). In the meantime, try out M7 and let us know what you think!

API Tooling From The Commandline

API tools has a very nice set of tools for analyzing API, creating .api_description files and scanning for API / internal use to mention but a few tasks. Using these tools currently requires you to make the apitooling-ant jar file available in an Eclipse environment or have them as part of a build process.

We though it would be nice to be able to run the tools from the command line as well. With that in mind we have provided a generalized Ant build file that can be used to do just that. The build file in question is available from CVS in the org.eclipse.pde.api.tools project in the scripts folder. Also available in the scripts folder is a properties which is needed to map the task names to the task classes that provide them.

The build file is fairly simple and has a plethora of comments to help you out. It performs 3 main tasks:
1. it builds the Ant classpath based on an Eclipse install
2. it extracts the apitooling-ant.jar from the API tools project jar
3. it runs whichever task you specifiy in the 'run' target

Here is a sample use of the build file for running the API use scans from the command line:

<project name="apiusetask" basedir="." default="run">
    <property name="scope" value="/eclipse/eclipse_3.4.2/">
    <property name="baseline" value="/eclipse/eclipse.tar.gz">
    <property name="xml.report.loc" value="/eclipse/apiuse-commandline/xml">
    <property name="html.report.loc" value="/eclipse/apiuse-commandline/html">
    <property name="exclude.list.loc" value="/eclipse/exclude.txt">
    <property name="eclipse.install.dir" value="/eclipse/eclipse/plugins">
    <property name="eclipse.lib.dir" value="/eclipse/lib">
    <property name="apiuse.task.props" value="/eclipse/lib/apiuse_tasks.properties">
   
    <target name="init" depends="extract-apitoolingjar">
        <taskdef file="${apiuse.task.props}">
            <classpath>
                <fileset dir="${eclipse.install.dir}">
                    <include name="*.jar">
                </fileset>
                <fileset dir="${eclipse.lib.dir}">
                    <include name="*.jar">
                </fileset>
            </classpath>
        </taskdef>
    </target>
    <target name="extract-apitoolingjar">
        <unjar overwrite="true" dest="${eclipse.lib.dir}">
            <fileset dir="${eclipse.install.dir}">
                <include name="org.eclipse.pde.api.tools_*.jar">
            </fileset>
            <patternset>
                <include name="**/*.jar">
            </patternset>
        </unjar>
        <move file="${eclipse.lib.dir}/lib/apitooling-ant.jar"
                     overwrite="true"     
                     todir="${eclipse.lib.dir}"/>
        <delete dir="${eclipse.lib.dir}/lib/" includeemptydirs="true">
    </target>
    <target name="run" depends="init">
        <apiuse
            baseline="${baseline}"
            scope="${scope}"
            report="${xml.report.loc}"
            excludelist="${exclude.list.loc}"
            considerinternal="true"
            considerapi="true"
            includenonapiprojects="true"
            debug="true"
        />
        <apiuse_reportconversion
            xmlfiles="${xml.report.loc}"
            htmlfiles="${html.report.loc}"
            debug="true"
        />
    </target>
</project>

To actually run the given build file you must have Ant available on the command line (obviously) and then run the following:

  root%>ant -buildfile <build file name>