Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

It is good news to see that the The Eclipse Integration for Apache Maven has been approved and that there will be official Maven integration into Eclipse, based on the work done by Carlos and other for Q4E, really soon. (via Carlos).

In other news - if you are using Maven for your Java builds, which you should, have a look at Brett Porter's slides on Maven Best Practices from ApacheCon. (via Steve)

Q4E - this is the third Eclipse Plugin that integrates the Maven build manager into the Eclipse IDE. (via Carlos Sanchez)

In the last days I have been blogging a bit too much about Mindquarry, so here are three open source software releases you should not miss:

• BlogBridge 5.0 - BlogBridge is still the best open source desktop feed reader and with the addition of the new BlogBridge service which allows posting to your weblog directly from blogbridge. This makes it ideal for short-circuted information workers (remind me to blog about this concept)
• Eclipse 3.3M6 - another Eclipse milestone. This time with improvements for Mac OS X and Vista.
• Hudson 1.91 - with support for version control repository browsers. Currently there is FishEye, ViewCVS, and ViewSVN support. When I have time some day, I will write a plugin for Hudson that provides better integration with Mindquarry, I promise. I have already checked out the source code and built it once, but there is also a lot of other stuff to do, so this might take some time.

Eclipse's last milestone for the 3.3 release is out for two days, and these are my top-10 reasons to upgrade:

1. SWT libraries automatically found (since M4) - this eases deployment of SWT applications dramatically. No longer setting java.library.path, just one single dependency, easily expressed as a Maven 2 dependency
2. System tray support added on Mac OS X (since M1, somehow workable since M4 - your starting class has to be in package org.eclipse.swt) - Now there is real cross-platform support for tray icons, notification area icons or menubar items
3. Code clean up on save (since M3) - makes it easy to adhere to coding conventions without much manual formatting
4. Text drag and drop in text editors (since M5) - very useful for manual reording of code
5. Advanced tooltips (since M4) - tooltips can contain more than text
6. New DateTime control (since M3) - date and time entry with improved usability
7. Mozilla Everywhere (since M5) - when you need a controlled web browser control and cannot rely on the operating system's default
8. Improved completion in annotations (since M2) - good for users of libraries like DAX that use annotations.
9. Working sets for the Project Explorer (since M2) - working set support for non-Java projects
10. Apply Patch offers full context patch preview (since M2)

There are numerous other improvements in these five milestones, but these are the features I like most and that convice me to upgrade to Eclipse 3.3M5 and use SWT 3.3M5 and JFace 3.3M5 for desktop GUI development.

Wayne Beaton describes how he uses DocBook-XSL customization layers to generate HTML version of the articles at Eclipse Corner. One article already using the DocBook setup is Unleashing the Power of Refactoring and it looks quite good. Wayne resumes:

Thus, while I quite hate fiddling around with XSL documents, the power that keeping the content separate from the presentation provides is appealing.

Carlos Sanchez points to the new Eclipse dependency packages in the Maven repository, that are automatically generated using Apache Felix maven bundle plugin. Carlos is working on improving the bidirectional mapping of Maven project object models and OSGi bundles.

Eugene Kuleshov comments:

With number of Eclipse bundles and its frequent release cycle, the idea if such repository don't really makes sense, maybe except for the Equinox itself. For the rest of bundles it is more appropriate to use Eclipse install as a repository of special format (it is called Target Platform in Eclipse's own build).

I cannot agree. When you are building SWT applications or RCP applications outside Eclipse, you cannot rely on Eclipse's build system, there needs to be an external build system and you cannot rely on having Eclipse as the target platform installed to provide all dependencies.

The Scala Team has mad a new release of Scala available and a new release of the Scala Eclipse Plugin. Scala is a programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that implements many very interesting concepts like being object-oriented and functional at the same time, strong statical typing and extensibility.