All the small things

I am using Eclipse since version 2.1 and I can’t imagine to work without it anymore. However, some things like the missing integration of SVN in the default distributions annoyed me for quite some time. Now with Eclipse 3.4, we have a build-in SVN support, but unfortunately the installation is anything but convenient. That’s why I decided to go through the process in my blog. Maybe this helps some of you out there to safe some time.

1. If you haven’t done it already, download Eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org (which version depends on your personal needs, but I usually go for the PDE version)

2. After having downloaded and “installed” Eclipse, go to the Eclipse update site (within Eclipse: “Help > Software Updates…”. Select the “Available Software” tab and then go to “Ganymede > Collaboration Tools > Subversive SVN Team Provider” and install the SVN Client.
(optional – actually for me it worked, so I would recommend it when running under Windows, install the Windows SVN client from Tortoise http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads. Under OS X however, you can safely skip this step.)

3. Now you need to add the actual SVN Connector from the following update site (no idea, why this one hasn’t been included in the first place!):
http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/
To do so, click: “Help” > “Software Updates…”. Select the “Available Software” tab and then click on “Add Site…”. Copy and paste the update site url into the dialog box and press “OK”. Now you should see the new update site in the list as a URL. Now open this update site and go to “Subversive SVN Connectors”. You’ll find a list mit all available connectors. You certainly can install all of them and try them out, one by one, which fits best for your environment. For me however, the “Native JavaHL 1.4.5 connector” together with the “SVNKit 1.1.7″ connector worked. (For those who haven’t installed the Tortoise Client, I think you have to install the Windows binaries, but I can’t confirm that without having tested it – maybe some of you who tried it can comment on this one)

4. Once you have this installed (and restarted your eclipse) select the installed connector in the SVN preferences (“Window > Preferences > Team > SVN” in the “SVN Connector” tab choose your connector in the drop-down menu.

That should be pretty much it. I am really wondering, why this has to be such an effort to just get the SVN to work. Really not the best user experience, if you ask me.

Cheers,
Mirko

Update Sept., 04th 2008: Fixed a menu name and extended the explanation for step 3.
Update Sept., 30th 2008: Updated the URL to the Polarion update-site according to feedback from Johan.

This time it’ll be a very short post I just want to support my favorite Webbrowser, which I use for years now and which has become my first program I usually install on a new computer. I hope this way I can give something back to the community.

The firefox team is currently trying to get a Guinness World Record by the most downloads within one day. To accomplish this, they created a website collecting potential downloaders and coordinating the event. If you’re a supporter of firefox (or wanna to become on) and want to give something back (besides being part of a world record) you might consider registering. Of course giving away your e-mail-address credentials is always something that concerns me, but I actually trust these guys and just hope they are not doing anything stupid with my data.

Besides being part of the effort, I think the latest version of Firefox sports a lot of cool new features, which are just worth checking out. Even the latest beta of Firefox 3 is already great and you might wonna have a look at the features it already provides. As far as I can tell, this version is already stable enough to give it a test drive. So give it a shoot and check it out!

Cheers,
Mirko

Lately, I was working on a problem, which really got me. I had a class throwing an exception for no obvious reason and the provided message wasn’t helping either. When I tried to take a look at the class, causing this problem, I noticed that I had no idea, where the class was actually coming from. Working with a lot of bundles, you usually don’t have all of them available in your development environment (especially when you work remotely on an external device f.i.), so using the search capabilities of your favorite IDE is not always an option. One might say that with well defined conventions, this is not much of a problem, but you are not always using your own code (actually most of the time I don’t) and you can’t dictate the way they create their components. Standards are great, but only if everyone complies with them. Anyway, to solve my problem, I had to import all my bundles into Eclipse and and search inside of Eclipse after the class – not really convenient.

Over the weekend, I decided to do something about this inconvenience and started to create a bundle to do this job in the running OSGi container. I just defined a service interface with a single method, a console extension for the Equinox and ProSyst mBS Console and implemented the interface in a handful lines of code and voila, here it is – the inspector bundle. Yet only providing one very simple command to show the bundles containing the given class. The service interface (net.mjahn.tools.inspector.IBundleUtils) is as simple as you can imagine. All it does is providing you the bundle having the given class in its class path (not the bundle class space – the bundle must provide the defining class loader of the class).

No magic and certainly no rocket science, but quiet handy when you don’t have all your bundles in the IDE. If someone is interested, the jar in a first version can be downloaded from the tools section here.