Willian Mitsuda.com

It is possible to make a local mirror of all Callisto update site with a little known command:

java -jar startup.jar -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate -command mirror -from http://download.eclipse.org/callisto/releases -to c:\eclipse-mirror -mirrorURL http://your.local.domain

Run this command from Eclipse install directory (i.e. where startup.jar is). 

Replace "c:\eclipse-mirror" with the local directory where the update site contents will be copied to, and "http://your.local.domain" with a URL which will point to the directory you informed.

Of course you will need to install a local web server, like Apache HTTPD and configure it according the directory/URL you specified before.

This is useful for making available a full Callisto release to internal corporate users, for example, reducing the bandwidth normally used with dozens of users downloading the same bits from external Callisto sites.

This feature also can be used to mirror any Eclipse update site and it is documented in more details here. 

After months, I finally got some time and updated the VS Presentation. It works now in Eclipse 3.1.2 and Eclipse 3.2 RC1. Check it out!

Again, a picture can say more than a thousand words…

A photo taken with a Palm Zire 72 camera ( 1.2 megapixels , 640×480):

The same photo taken with a Nokia 6230 camera ( VGA camera , 640×480):

My Palm Zire 72 started to lost its blue paint, so I decided to give it a descent appearence.

One picture can say more than a thousand words…

Before:

After:

Now, it turned into a Zire 72 “Silver Edition”.

See the entire Extreme Makeover Slideshow.

According to Michael Valenta‘s comment in the previous post, the “I LOVE YOU” is part of pserver authentication protocol.

I just found a page that explains this funny authentication protocol: on success, the server responds “I LOVE YOU“; on failure, “I HATE YOU”.

I just discovered ANT loves me: (screenshot)

Now, let‘s talk serious: it seems that Eclipse mixed some CVS dump with ANT output in the console, but… I LOVE YOU? WTF!!!

I just released a new version of VS Presentation plugin.

I made some minor improvements over the original VS Presentation, and there is now a new “VS Improved Presentation” : (screenshot)

It has the minimize and maximize buttons. The editor tab now show the corresponding icon.

Install instructions:

• Just download the jar file and put it into plugins directory of Eclipse 3.1 (still using 3.0? sorry… it is time to upgrade
• In Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Current Presentation, you will see two options: “VS Presentation“ (the original) and “VS Improved Presentation”. Select one and restart Eclipse.

It seems that the Presentations API slides from EclipseCon 2005 had been made available in CVS a few hours ago.

Martin Perez posted in his blog his experiences using the VS Presentation plugin to make jLibrary look like Visual Studio.NET.

He posted interesting information on making a custom presentation as default in RCP applications.

On those crazy days where Microsoft presents a session on EclipseCon, and JavaOne, how would be if Eclipse and Visual Studio.NET were “merged”?

Some time ago, I started investigating the presentations API.

It is available since Eclipse 3.0, but it is not a very “popular” API. There is no documentation, no tutorials, no articles, and the only thing I found was some examples lost in Eclipse CVS.

The presentations API enable us to customize the look and feel of views and editors in Eclipse.

I started a project in SourceForge. The first release from this project was inspired by the idea in the start of this post. It is a presentation that mimics the look and feel from Visual Studio.NET.

Personnaly, I think VS.NET workbench looks better than Eclipse in some aspects, but it has a lot of usability problems, like:

• Editor bar: it is very hard to see where is some file.
• Navigation through editors and views: the scroll buttons are very confusing.

The intend of this plugin was to emulate VS.NET workbench, so these annoyances were replicated as much as possible

It is not fully functional nor fully VS.NET compliant yet:

• Ctrl+E does not work because apparently it is handled by presentation; it is not a “global“ action like Ctrl+F6.
• There is no “pin button“ on view‘s title bar, because I found no way to turn a IPresentablePart into a fast view. I think this functionality was not exposed in the public API.
• In VS.NET, the view tabs are “stretched” when you resize them horizontally. I think this is one of the dumbest usability bugs in VS.NET, and it is somewhat difficult to implement, so I decided to create scroll buttons like in the editor bar.

Download page.

To install, just drop the jar in the plugins directory of a Eclipse 3.1 installation (yes, it uses the new 3.1‘s feature: deploy plugins as jars), and select “VS Presentation” in Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Current Presentation. Restart Eclipse.

Screenshots:

Visual Studio.NET:

Eclipse with VS Presentation plugin: