When coding in Eclipse RCP or, for that matter, any JFace based UI, you often times are implementing viewers, which require a content provider and a label provider. In most cases, you’re dealing with the IStructuredContentProvider API, which would be appropriate for both the ListViewer and TableViewer classes.

If you have a need to populate these views with data that is effectively static, you can use the org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ArrayContentProvider class to get you up and running quickly; and it is really quite functional in many cases.

Eclipse 3.4 M5 is available for download.

See the New & Noteworthy here.

Nick Boldt has a perfect quote in an IRC trace embedded in his recent blog entry ‘Dr. Strangechannel Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IRC’:

nickboldt: […] it’s open source. to “demand” without opening a bug is like pissing on your car to make it start

I tried that once - what bothered me was the steps to turn it back off.

There is a very intriguing ‘part 1’ tutorial about the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) over at Developerworks.

This article was written in part by Chris Aniszczyk, who most people who deal with Eclipse will recognize as a very strong force in the Eclipse community.

I follow most of the Eclipse development mailing-lists because they are low-traffic, and typically only carry conversations relevant to the development side, as opposed to the storm of questions and puzzlers that hit the newsgroups. Periodically you will receive a “Hey, how can I do this?” followed briefly by a “Please ask further questions on the newsgroup”.

As much as I hate to draw further attention to it, I love the soap-opera progressing between Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Alex Blewitt with these two posts: (Eclipse is Not Free and Oh no, it’s Bjorn Again).

Eclipse 3.4 Milestone 2 was released a day late on Saturday, with all of the piratey fan-fare you would expect from the Eclipse team:

Ahoy, me hearties! Eclipse 3.4 milestone 2 (M2) is a’ailable for download from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php. This drop is bein’ propagated t’ the ‘arious Eclipse mirror sites, which usually takes a day or so.

For people who already downloaded the integration build with timestamp 200709210919, thar’s no need t’ download M2 - tis’ the same. Aye, me parrot concurs.

Bind Me Later

One of the key elements of any non-trivial data binding implementation is how you control the timing of the binding of data. Most of the simple examples of JFace or JGoodies data binding simply have ‘live’ bindings, where any change made on one side is immediately propagated to the other side. While this is valuable, and is certainly a neat party trick when you have two UI controls bound to the same field, it is in my estimation, the less common scenario.

I’ve been working with JFace a lot recently in an RCP application. One of the technologies I have started working with in detail is JFace Data Binding; now that it has left ‘provisional’ status, I figure I ought to start taking advantage of it wherever I can.

JGoodies Comparisons

The end-game/freeze plan for Eclipse 3.3 (aka Europa) was released through e-mail today via Kim Moir: