SWT Look and Feel: Customize FlatScrollBar Color and More
Recently I introduced a custom slider control useful for improving the SWT look and feel of more subtle view layouts. Happily it seems the widget already found early adopters outside of the Code Affine world. Which led to some enhancements that will be presented in the following sections. SWT Look…
Apache FOP Integration with Eclipse and OSGi
Apache FOP is an open source print processor driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO). It can be quite useful to transform data objects into a PDF for example. However it turned out to be somewhat cumbersome to get it integrated into PDE and finally up and running as OSGi Service….
Sacrilege – a Custom SWT Scrollbar
SWT is a thin abstraction layer on top of native OS widgets. Which is a very good thing if you intent that your applications integrate well with the OS look and feel. But as a trade-off this approach limits styling capabilities significantly. In particular I perceive the native SWT scrollbar…
JGit Authentication Explained
Authentication in JGit is mostly on par with native Git. Commonly used protocols like SSH and HTTP(S) and their authentication methods are supported. This article summarizes how to use the JGit authentication API to access remote Git repositories securely. Though the examples in this article use the CloneCommand, the described…
Deferred Fetching of Model Elements with JFace Viewers
Model elements displayed by Eclipse JFace Viewers sometimes take a considerable amount of time to load. Because of this the workbench provides the type IDeferredWorkbenchAdapter to fetch such model elements in background. Unfortunately this mechanism seems to be supported only for AbstractTreeViewer derivates via the DeferredTreeContentManager. Hence I developed a…
SWT Mouse Click Implementation
Doing a bit of SWT custom widget development lately, I stumbled across the question why is there no such thing as a default SWT mouse click listener? As this subject raises once in a while, I thought writing a word or two about the rational ground behind – and how…
OSGi Testsuite: Introducing Classname Filters
OSGi Testsuite is a JUnit test-runner that collects dynamically test classes for execution. It has been published by my fellow Rüdiger about a year ago and proven useful in some projects already. However for gonsole we had to use an ugly patch because version 1.0 only supported .*Test postfix matching…
Efficient Creation of Eclipse Modules with Maven Archetype
Maven Archetype is a project templating toolkit that provides developers with the means to generate parameterized versions of built-in or custom scaffolding artefacts. Recently I applied it to our Xiliary P2 repository to achieve automation of Eclipse module stubs creation. As it worked out well enough, I thought it might…
Lightweight Integration Tests for Eclipse Extensions
Recently I introduced a little helper for Eclipse extension point evaluation. The auxiliary strives to reduce boilerplate code for common programming steps, while increasing development guidance and readability at the same time. This post is the promised follow-up that shows how to combine the utility with an AssertJ custom assert…
Explore Git Internals with the JGit API
Have you ever wondered how Git stores a commit and its content? Well, I have, and I had some spare time over the last rainy weekend, so I did a little research. Because I feel more at home with Java than with Bash, I used JGit and a couple of…
Eclipse Extension Point Evaluation Made Easy
Coding Eclipse Extension Point evaluations comes in a bit verbose and sparsely self-explaining. As I got round to busy myself with this topic recently, I wrote a little helper with the intent to reduce boilerplate code for common programming steps, while increasing development guidance and readability at the same time….
How to Access a Git Repository with JGit
A Git repository is represented in JGit through the Repository class that can be viewed as a handle to a repository. With a Repository instance, you can create JGit commands (through the Git factory class), gain access to configuration settings, resolve refs, etc. There are several ways to obtain a…
How to Safely Use SWT’s Display asyncExec
Most user interface (UI) toolkits are single-threaded and SWT is no exception. This restriction means that UI objects must be accessed exclusively from a single thread, the so-called UI thread. On the other hand, long-running tasks should be executed in background threads to keep the UI responsive. This makes it…
Unleashing gonsole 1.0, a Git Console for Eclipse
Over the last few weeks, Frank and I had some spare time. As summer hadn’t yet arrived in Germany, we decided to spend that time coding… What came out is Gonsole, a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE which provides a Git Console. The features that we originally intended to implement…
gonsole weeks: a git console for eclipse
Even though Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. Because of that, Frank and I started to fill this gap a few weeks ago. If you are interested in what happened during this time you may want…
gonsole weeks: multiple console sessions
While Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. This gave Frank and me the idea, to start an open source project to provide a git console integration for the IDE. What happened so far during the gonsole…
gonsole weeks: oops – it’s a framework
While Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. This gave Rüdiger and me the idea, to start an open source project to provide a git console integration for the IDE. What happened so far during the gonsole…
gonsole weeks: content assist for git commands
While Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. This gave Frank and me the idea, to start an open source project to provide a git console integration for the IDE. What happened so far during the gonsole…
gonsole weeks: eclipse egit integration
While Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. This gave Rüdiger and me the idea, to start an open source project to provide a git console integration for the IDE. Rüdiger anounced the launch of this project…
gonsole weeks: git init gonsole
For many developers, Git has become the tool of choice when it comes to version control systems. Those that work in Eclipse are provided with a comprehensive Git tool integration. But it seems that for certain tasks the command line is favored. Some find it more convenient to type in…