dynamic EMF SWT Views (not only) for Business Applications

…back from the redView – “RoadShow“: Eclipse Democamps in Frankfurt, Vienna (presented by Flo) and Hamburg – also NightSchool at W-JAX and OpenSource Expo in Karlsruhe. This time the Eclipse Democamps were all crowded: the winner was Hamburg with more then 110 attendees.

I like the Eclipse Democamps: see what happens in other projects, always learning something new, interesting discussions… and of course later in the evening meeting friends and drinking some beer. Thanks to all the Organizers, Sponsors and Eclipse Foundation to make these events possible. For me as a self-employed independent Software Architect its an easy way to get in contact with some hundred developers from Eclipse universe living in my country

It was great to demonstrate redView at Democamps and its good to see how many developers are interested to learn more about this project. We’re finishing some final steps to prepare the launch of a first beta of redView this month. Really: otherwise I have to spend a bottle of good redwine to Christian Campo and I would prefer to get one from his wine cellar

redView Slides with audio available

Some asked me to publish my slides from redView – presentation, but these are “Zen“-like, so I added audio and uploaded as movie at Vimeo -

You can watch the slides here.

The slides are only one part of the redView demonstration: there was always also a “live demo” part. So I created some screencasts:

Screencast: First Steps with redView’s WYSIWYG Designer

Click here to view the Screencast at Vimeo.

A simple example about redView Designer Editor, Outline, Properties and how to change design by Drag-n-drop, Properties or from Outline.

The real power behind redView is the combination with openArchitectureWare (Eclipse Modeling: MWE, Xpand/Xtend, Xtext) if you generate your redView Views. Together with Eclipse Runtime (Equinox, Riena) you can even generate a complete Riena RCP Application with UI and Navigation. With redView Eclipse Modeling meets Eclipse Runtime: its a perfect association.

Screencast: Live-Pushing of Design-Changes into running RCP Applications (using CDO)

Click here to view the screencast at Vimeo.

In this screencasts there are two (generated) Riena RCP Applications running: one under OSX, the other one under Linux Ubuntu. Then inside the IDE the UI Designer makes some changes and these are pushed live into the running RCP Applications. This can be very useful while testing new Views together with the business departments. Thanks to CDO the EMF SWT Views are stored on a server anywhere so all can be done a distributed way.

Screencast: redView’s Visibility Processor

Click here to view the screencast at Vimeo.

redView provides Visibility Processor, Visibility Desriptors and Visibility Conflict resolver. This is an example with nested Views to design Associations with Superclasses. Imagine a Driver who drives a Vehicle. Vehicle is an abstract class and this could be a Car or a Truck.

In your SWT View you need the fields of Car or Truck displayed inside a Composite. Imagine how much code this would be and see how easy you define it using redView.

redView at EclipseCon 2010 – redView and e4

Curious to see what will happen at EclipseCon – there are already some discussions how to get redView under Eclipse Umbrella. redView will also be a perfect addition to e4 – we’ll provide next year redView as a ViewPart for e4 workbench.

If you like redView and want to see more, then please comment and vote for my Submissions at EclipseCon 2010:

Dynamic EMF Views (not only) for OSGI Business Applications

- a short Talk (25 Min)

Modeling meets Runtime: In 2 Hours from your Domain Model to a running RCP Application together with UI Designer

I promise: you leave the session with a running RCP Application, the redView UI – WYSIWYG Designer and Views stored on a CDO Server.

BTW: there are also submissions about PDE + Cool Views from Target Platform and Logging in OSGI Applications

HowTo Change FileEncoding of Eclipse Projects (OSX)

If you followed my blogs you know that I just finished migration from oaw4 (http://openarchitectureware.org) to oaw5 (Eclipse Modeling: EMFT – MWE, M2T – Xpand, TMF – Xtext).

In oaw4 projects I used File Encoding ISO-8859-1 as global workspace setting:

All Projects inherit File Encoding from container (Workspace) – so they also are using ISO-8859-1.

oaw – workflows (.oaw in oaw4 and .mwe in oaw5) are manually set to UTF-8:

uml models, emf models, xml files are automatically detected by Eclipse as UTF-8:

Some workflows explicitely set File Encoding, per ex. using Xpand2 Generator Component, outlets etc:

Some years ago this was the only solution working for me using OSX and Windows and openArchitectureWare.

Converting from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8

As result of some discussions at oaw-workinggroup mailing list it seems that using UTF-8 for all kind of oaw – templates should work on all platforms, so I decided to switch from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Then its easy to handle: all files are using UTF-8, no manual settings, no workflow-specific settings and UTF-8 can be used from all OS and more languages then ISO-8859-1.

I did my tests on OSX and Windows and all works well, I can enter oaw’s special characters inside editors like

« ... »

At first let’s change the Workspace Preferences:

But it’s nott only changing a preferences – value – it means all existing templates and other files have to be converted to use the new FileEncoding.

Here’s how I solved that:

1. Detect what kind of files have to be converted

Xtend templates (*.ext)

Xpand templates (*.xpt)

Check templates (*.chk)

properties files (*.properties)

java sourcecode files (*.java)

textfiles (*.txt)

• Xtend templates (*.ext)
• Xpand templates (*.xpt)
• Check templates (*.chk)
• properties files (*.properties)
• java sourcecode files (*.java)
• textfiles (*.txt)

2. HowTo convert file encoding of a bunch of files recursive

I’m working on OSX and there’s a built-in utility: iconv. That’s great because for this one-time work I don’t wanted to write code.

If you type iconv -l in terminal you’ll get the list of supported encodings.

Using the following command you can change the encoding of one file:

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 myFile.xyz > myFile.utf8abc

But there are many files to convert recursive in a whole workspace. It’s not my daily work to use bash shell in terminal, so I googled but got no good solution how to solve the issue.

Then I remembered the great keynote of http://stackoverflow.com from last EclipseCon and asked my question there. Soon later I got some tips and were able to create the command

find /myPath2Workspace/myWorkspace -name \*.xpt -type f | \
	    (while read file; do
	        iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 "$file" > "${file%.xpt}.utf8xpt";
	    done);

copy the command to Terminal:

hit OK and the conversion was done. repeat this step for all kinds of files you want to convert.

3. Test the Conversion and Rename

Now you can take a look at the converted files and test visually if all was well converted.

Last step is deleting the old files (in the example above *.xpt) and renaming (in this case *.utf8xpt to *.xpt)

You can do all of this using commands in terminal, but I did it the OSX – UI – way:

To delete the old files I’m using OSX Spotlight: search for .xpt in the workspace directory, select all from result, move to trash.

Then search for .utf8xpt using Spotlight, move selection to NameChanger, rename from .utf8xpt to .xpt and you’re done.

Hint: I blogged about NameChanger here.

Now all my existing and new oaw5 projects are using UTF-8

redView – Dynamic Views for Business Applications

This year at EclipseCon in Santa Clara I presented first time the new Open Source project “redView” – started from Florian Pirchner and me.

The session was presented without the usual “slides-to-read-while-speaker-speaks”. I was inspired by the book “Zen and the Art of Presentation” to make another kind of presentation.

But if you present a session in Zen – style, you couldn’t only publish your slides to people not hearing you live. A Zen – style – session is only the half of work – you also have to publish detailed technical informations in an extra document.

In this case – those details will be published soon at redview.org to download.

If you were not at EclipseCon or visited another slot and want to know what I have presented, you’re not lost – you can watch a Video Podcast:

ekkes – corner – tv just started

As an addition to my blogs in english and german language now I also will publish regular an english Video Podcast at ekkes – corner – tv.org:

I’ll talk about and make live-demos about:

• Eclipse as IDE and Platform for RCP and Server
• OSGI – Equinox
• Eclipse PDE (OSGI Bundle Tooling)
• Eclipse Riena (Remoting, UI)
• EasyBeans (EJB3 OSGI Bundles)
• Drools (Rules Engine, Business Process Flows)
• redView (Riena EMF Dynamic Views)
• open-erp-ware (OSGI – ERP – Enterprise Application)
• Model-Driven Development (oAW – OpenArchitectureWare XPand, XTend, Xtext, Workflow)
• and more…

If you want to subscribe my Video Podcast:

open iTunes Store, search for „ekkes-corner“ and subscribe. There are two different formats available: for iPod/iPhone and for Desktop/AppleTV).

If you don’t use iTunes Store you can read it directly from my web site: ekkes-corner-tv.org or subscribe RSS Feed from there.

The first episode presents the redView Session from EclipseCon.

EclipseCon was as usual: very short nights – but also much fun to meet all the friends again and to learn much.

Next months will be very hard:

• redView should be published beginning of may 2009
• my OSGI – Equinox – Server should run under Galileo
• my ERP Enterprise App should go live in summer 2009

Not to forget: this month is JAX 2009 in Mainz (Germany) where I speak at OSGI Experts Day

There will be some Blogs and Video Podcasts to reflect all this work… stay tuned…

ekke