Wicked Blog

Logging within an Eclipse RCP application is pretty easy, every Activator provides an ILog using it’s getLog() method. Though it’s a little annoying wrapping the log statements with an IStatus, using some convenience methods solves that. But what about using another logging framework, e.g. Log4J?

Nearly everybody who tried to use Log4J accross Eclipse bundles faced the context classloader problem. Usually, the Log4J binaries should be placed within a library bundle. The configuration, the log4j.properties file, though is supposed to be somewhere else within a project specific bundle. Creating a Logger instance then runs into a problem: the configuration is not visible from the library bundle. So what to do now?

A pretty elegant solution is to use a fragment containing the configuration tied to the library bundle. So the project specific configuration is seperated from the framework and can be managed individually.

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Yesterday, the Eclipse DemoCamp 2008 Ganymede_Edition/Hamburg was on schedule in Hamburg’s Former Coffee Exchange. Round about 40 Eclipse enthusiasts took part which is a pretty nice crowd of people. Thanks to Peter and Martin Hamburg now provides two regular events for the Eclipse community around here which is really nice (assuming and hoping that the DemoCamp and the Stammtisch will now occur regularly :). We had very interesting talks about Eclipse, especially Reginald’s talk about automated GUI Testing was pretty wicked. Unfortunatly I missed out taking photos, but trust me, if you didn’t attend, do it next time!

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Today a collegue of mine asked me to check in some change to our SVN repository. This was a little tricky as I had a home office day today and no access to our repository. Fortunatly there is this handy ‘create patch’ function in my Eclipse contextmenu. So I simply created a patch as a text file and sent it to him by Google Talk. A remote offline checkin - wicked eyh?

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On friday, the 6th session of our Grand Poker Season took place. Dirk “The Shaker”, our host came in 3rd, Andreas winning again is about to follow Hani as this years ‘Altmeister’. Here are the results:

1. Andreas
2. Stefan
3. Dirk
4. Lars
5. Heike
6. Stephan
7. Matthias

Dirk is still head of the table followed by myself and Stephan. Again we are all looking forward to the next session again at Andreas place.

See you at the tables!

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Developing Java web application really is a pain in the butt. Simple things like autocompletion, an editable table or client and server side validation seam to be so damn tricky. Sure, you get all these JSF frameworks from Sun or Apache, Rich Faces, Ajax 4 JSF and so on. All these promise to make things SOOOO easy. But tying these together busts the whole thing as they do not work together properly. You really have to bend everything to the max to get it at least running. Why is everybody so fancy about Web Applications anyway? Actually, the Web initially was made for a specific reason which is to display content. Abusing it to develop applications that more or less look and behave like a ‘real’ application brings me to the question, why we do that anyway. Is distribution that important that we need use a hammer to get in the screw?

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… at least I hope so. It’s has been beautiful weather around here for about 2 weeks now. I really enjoyed it, believe me. But spending about 2000 liters of water each evening to keep my green alive is pretty bad, besides it costs me about 1 hour to get that done. So let it rain!

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On friday, the 5th session of our Grand Poker Season took place. Andreas was our host due to his win of the 3rd session. It was great fun again though the head of the table, Dirk “The Shaker” was kicked out first. Here are the results:

1. Andreas
2. Stefan
3. Stephan
4. Hani
5. Heike
6. Lars
7. Dirk

Dirk is still head of the table but only one point ahead. We are all looking forward to the next session at “The Shaker”’s place.

See you at the tables!

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Awesome - Beautiful location and 35 participants proved Hamburg to have a big interested Eclipse community. Thank you Peter an Ralph for organizing this event. I think there’ll be another one for sure.

What I found funny is, that I met Markus Kuppe, who I thought lived in the same street with me when I was a little boy (about 8 years old or so). Actually he did’t, it was a friend of his. So I was wrong, but anyway we had a pretty nice talk about OR mappers and OO DBs.

This is pretty exiciting when it comes to distributed Eclipse  RCP applications - but you’ll have to wait for my book to read more ;). So here are some pictures for those who missed today - Don’t worry, there’ll be another one, pretty sure!

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Tomorrow, May 5th, the first “Eclipse Stammtisch Hamburg” will take place. Everyone who is interested in Eclipse is invited. So drop by for a glass of beer and some words about Eclipse. We’ll meet at 19:00 at the Bolero Bar & Restaurant in Hamburg Ottensen, don’t miss it!

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