It's not a bug, it's an accidental feature

Eclipse Ganymede has been out for about two weeks now, but when perusing its download page I didn't find links to the New and Noteworthy items in each package. The Java EE package would appear to be a hit , likely because that's an easy way to install the Web Tools Platform. Admittedly I'm biased since I both work on WTP and regularly coordinate its New and Noteworthy documents, but check out what's new in WTP right here . As if that weren't enough, to really see all that's new in the "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers", you also want to read about what's new in the Data Tools Platform , the DSDP's Remote System Explorer , EMF , Mylyn , GEF , and the Eclipse Platform with its JDT and PDE trimmings. You might want to go grab a drink before you sit down and read it all.

I've seen more than one post (well deservedly) applauding the enhanced support for content-type specific icons in Eclipse 3.4M6 and showing how to make use of them through an extension or org.eclipse.ui.editors , but I think that something needs to be pointed out about that solution. Developers who do this aren't just specifying their icons, they're specifying whole new editors. This isn't a bad thing, but every editor has to have a unique ID, and it's easy to forget that some other features depend on that editor ID. The most common example is the org.eclipse.ui.actionSetPartAssociations extension point, which adds menu and toolbar actions automatically as you switch from workbench part to workbench part. In WTP, this is how the JSP and Web Page Editors ensure that the Run menu is present and populated with the Launch action set, and it's how most editors expose the Annotation Navigation action set. So when you're registering an editor to get that cus...

Wayne's been posting the User Data Collector results periodically, and one thing I've noticed is that WTP's XML Editor has seriously moved up in the "rankings" to be just behind the Java editor we all know and love. Luckily I caught myself before starting to chant "we're number two, we're number two!" outloud. Its count still pales in comparison to that of the Java editor, of course, although I do have to wonder what will happen when Ganymede goes out the door. In the spirit of the EclipseCon Face-time Poker game, anyone have odds on the Java Editor keeping its lead through the end of the year? And anyone else think that by trading cards it feels more like Face-time Go Fish ? One thing that the results have brought into focus, for me, is that after discounting the commands in our WTP editors that are inherited from the Platform, the one we have for formatting is the most recorded outside of the Platform and JDT. While statistics can easi...

During a misadventure over the past weekend, a friend reminded me that the last significant entry in my personal blog was about a Zombie Walk from October. The most recent one, however, was about my plan to attend FUDCon 8. FUDCon is a gathering of Fedora users and developers, vaguely like Rational's own annual Software Developer Conference. Most attendees are either working on developing Fedora itself or deploying and managing systems using Fedora, which somewhat put me on the sidelines. Fedora was one of the first distributions to include Eclipse compiled natively so it could be run with an open source VM. My own involvement with Fedora traces back to its predecessor, Red Hat Linux. And I don't mean the Enterprise offering they market these days, I mean the original Red Hat Commercial Linux, from when modular kernels were new, automatic hardware detection didn't happen, and when RPM was still written in Perl and the complete guide to using and creating packages for i...