Today a new Eclipse version codenamed Kepler was released, with a lot of nice new features, including conflict handling during update, an update user interface for the Marketplace client or various EGit updates (my favorite is the Commit and Push button in the Commit dialog).
About the less visible stuff, in the modeling projects we use, e.g. EMF, Graphiti or Xtext also got some internal updates, resulting in the need to update our projects. As of now, I updated the Xtext Reflective Editor, as a change in EMF 2.9 made it unusable in Kepler.
I often use this tool to debug the Xtext-based parsers that use Xbase and model inferrers, as it displays the generated model using the EMF reflective editors. Version 0.5.5 is a recommended minor update – it works on both newer EMF/Xtext versions, but maintains compatibility with older EMF versions. It is still downloadable from our update site http://eclipse.cubussapiens.hu.
Thanks for all contributors the new, nice features of Kepler (and of course fixes as well). This can become a new platform for new projects for me – the reflective editor update is only the first of them.
One of the most common tasks when working with models is executing queries on them (e.g. finding a set of corresponding model elements for code generation or finding violations for model constraints) – quite often repeatedly. To allow effective calculation and recalculation, an index of the EMF model has to be created and maintained during editing operations.
EMF-IncQuery is a tool we are developing at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics try to solve this issue by providing a runtime library for these indexes, and additionally an Eclipse-based tooling to specify and debug such queries. I have already blogged about a validation framework based on this technology, and my collegue, István Ráth gave a short presentation in last year’s EclipseCon Europe Modeling Symposium.
However, previous tool demos were held using a tooling and query language originally created for the VIATRA2 model transformation framework, so it was somewhat hard to use. Since these demonstrations we created a new, Xtext-based tooling using a modified query language that fits the EMF model specifications better.
The Xtext-based editor with type information hovers.
Another new user interface component is the Query Explorer: a view that allows evaluating developed queries without using the generated code in a new Eclipse instance, while allowing the reuse of existing domain editors.
The Query Explorer can be used to evaluate patterns using existing model editors.
As for examples, since last year we developed two new case studies for EMF-IncQuery:
We also created connectors for JFace databinding for query results allowing query-backed automatically updating user interfaces.
Even better, this new version is available since Wednesday – for a detailed release notes see the announcement post in our homepage. If you want to download this release, you can use the Eclipse Marketplace client (at least if search is working as expected – today we managed to not find our software there using the built-in search 🙁 ). Alternatively, EMF-IncQuery is available from our update site: http://viatra.inf.mit.bme.hu/update/incquery/
Alltogether, the new EMF-IncQuery release marks an important point: we believe at this point, it is ready for use. For me, this is an important checkpoint, as in the last year I put a considerable effort of getting this rolling.
As for the future, EMF-IncQuery is on its track to becoming an Eclipse project: the creation review is scheduled for the 10th October 2012. After the creation, we plan to migrate our codebase, and have of course further ideas on how to improve the system to be usable in more and more cases.
I update the Debug Visualisation plug-in – a nasty bug was present related to opening new nodes that caused in the best case slowdowns, in worst cases exceptions and crashes.
This release is a bugfix release only, it is avaiable from the update site or Eclipse Marketplace, and recommended for every user of the plug-in.
In the last year I often had to held live presentations of Eclipse development. At that point a typical problem is, that the font sizes used during development are too small for the projector.
The possible solutions are either ignoring this fact, using a special environment, where all the appropriate settings have been made, or tweaking the development environment. The tweaking will not work, as several settings should be made, and they are easy to forget, while the special presentation environment seems too much of a hassle for me. This left as the only choice to ignore the fact.
But finally I had some hacking time, so I created a Presentation theme for Eclipse, that solves tweaking by a single selection of the user interface: Themes can be selected in the General/Appearance tab on the Preferences page.
Currently, the theme description is a bit hacky: for every platform the default font is copied by hand to the plugin.xml (using a Windows 7, a OpenSuse 11.3 Linux and a Snow Leopard machine). More research is needed to solve this in a more generic way. Luckily only four fonts have been redefined by the theme.
Some things missing: support for resizing elements in JFace viewers (such as EMF tree editors or CNF views), and the theme was not tested with graphical editors – although they can be resized using the Zoom control.
Finally, an early alpha version can be downloaded from our update site: http://eclipse.cubussapiens.hu
I’m looking for some feedback, or either alternative implementation ideas; I think, others have already met these problems.
After a month, some bugs from the Debug Visualisation version 0.8.0 have been fixed. Most notably, the incorrect trimming of long titles, and a case, where arcs were incorrectly removed from the graph.
Two minor new features were also introduced: it is possible to turn off name trimming, and the values of variables is now displayed as a hover.
I created a screencast to show these new features (and also some other, as the last screencast was created over a year ago.
(If the embedded video does not show in your feed reader, you can watch it on YouTube.)
