Posted by Erik Jan de Wit in the early evening: December 26th, 2007
I have used the mylyn plugin before (it was called mylar then), but I never had a project where it could be really useful. But now I that I have, I’m really enthusiastic.
First let me explain what mylyn is. According to their own website it is a: “Task-Focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy”. It does this by integrating with your task repository (issue tracking systems like jira, trac, bugzilla), so that when you need to switch to or from issues it will maintain the context of the issue you were working on, so that when you switch back you will have all the files you had opened and that we’re important then. This will reduce the overhead associated with switching between tasks.
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early morning: September 12th, 2007
The second eclipse quick tip is here where i show you how i use the external tool feature of eclipse to launch the selected shell script. So enjoy our new short video!
Head on over to our podcast page here or download or subscribe to our new podcast.xebia.com.
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the late afternoon: August 8th, 2007
Well we have a new addition to our podcasts! Video! and we start off with Serge giving you an Eclipse tip; Links directory.
Serge shows how to use a “links directory” in Eclipse and how to easily manage plugins across installations.
So head on over to our podcast page here or download or subscribe to our new podcast.xebia.com.
Posted by Lars Vonk at around evening time: May 7th, 2007
For a current project I use maven 1 as build tool. I always generate the eclipse plugin for generating the .project and .classpath file because I do not want to add dependencies both in the project.xml and the eclipse classpath. The eclipse plugin can also link the source files to the dependencies in your project, I find this a handy feature because you always need to debug and step through the code of some dependency.
However since the maven 1 repository is maintained even worse as the maven 2 repository you won’t find any sources jars for the newer versions of dependencies (for instance Spring 2.0). Besides this being very annoying the eclipse plugin also takes ages to finish because it gets a lot of time-outs about not being able to download the sources jars from the maven 1 repository. That’s why I created a small Jelly script that made it is possible to traverse through the maven 2 repository and grab the sources jars from there. Here’s the smelly Jelly that made it all possible:
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Posted by Silvester Van der Bijl at around evening time: August 29th, 2006
Many applications we built have to provide reporting to allow end users to monitor results, progress, etc. In most cases a simple query and an Excel export is more than sufficient. In cases where more advanced reports are required we often look at projects like JasperReports or if that doesn’t suffice maybe even Crystal Reports. As I’ll try to explain in this blog, it might be worth your time to take a look at Eclipse BIRT.
The Eclipse “Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools” is one of those Eclipse projects I’ve been tracking for some time now. Its current release features a report designer based on our favorite IDE (also available as standalone download) which allows non-technical users to create reports with charts, tables, etc. It includes a web based report viewer application. It can of course execute the report designs, but also provides export capabilities (with AJAX column selection) and a range of other features.
For a more thorough overview of the features of BIRT, take a look at their website at http://eclipse.org/birt/phoenix. Features I found interesting:
- Standalone designer (based on the Eclipse IDE)
- Support for various datasources (including XML)
- Different output formats (with similiar layout)
Currently it supports PDF and HTML, but there is also an (experimental) XLS emitter available. Look for “tribix” here: http://qauck.blogspot.com
In most cases we want to include the reporting directly in our applications (to be able to provide security, caching, etc.). Since most of our applications are built using the Spring framework it would be convenient if we could use BIRT by instantiating a few beans. As it turns out we can, but it took me some time reading (sometimes) badly documented source code and googling a lot. The remainder of this blog describes the steps I took to integrate BIRT in a sample Spring web application.