-k.

As a regular subversion and eclipse user I’ve been longing for an eclipse feature that provided the functionality of the CVS feature but for subversion. I battled along using subclipse but it never quite seemed to feel stable and I often ended up reverting to using the command line. Now there is a better solution Subversive

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and I’m really impressed. It works most of the time and if it errors an error report is generated. With a click of a button you can send it to the developers. When this happened to me the issue was fixed in the next release, bloody impressive.

An updated version of Necessitas is now available. Necessitas is an Eclipse plug-in that adds a class-path container to manage a projects jars using the ivy dependency manager. You get the advantages of ivy without leaving eclipse.

Key features for this release:

• Start-up time greatly reduced (especially for poor bastards like me on a modem
• Update to Ivy 1.2a
• Takes advantage of the new “cache only” operations in 1.2a
• Will attempt to assign source achieves if they are available
• You can check for updated dependencies without downloading them
• Ivy messages are available while updating
• Lots of internal cleanup

It can be downloaded from the usual location (http://eclipse.oneill.id.au/updates/).

0.3.1 is a minor update that corrects a problem with the embedded ivy library (for some reason it had a jdk 1.5 class file, probably my fault). The plugin also packages jakarta commons httpclient rather than relying on the default URL handler in the JRE.

There were reports of problems using the update site for 0.3.0 (it didn’t seem to replace the old version properly). I’ve upgraded a couple of machines from 0.3.0 to 0.3.1 and they’ve both picked up the new version correctly. If anyone does have a problem please let me know.

I love my Mac but using Eclipse can be painful at times. It slows down to the point it’s unusable and the problem seems to have gotten worst recently. So today, after watching my CPU jump to 100% usage every-time I typed or scrolled I did a bit of a scan of the Eclipse bug list to see if I could find an answer.

Bug 95475 sounded like a good place to start, a good number of other mac users complaining about the same thing as I was experiencing. I began to read through the comments. A few made mention of the fact that the slowdown occurred after running a swing application. I realized that this was also true in my case (I’m working on a swing application for corporation x). Then I read this comment.

I’ve been trying to pay more attention to this “slowdown” problem and quantify it a bit and since
yesterday, I’ve had some interesting observations. I started on 3.0 (3.0.1?) and had it running for a
couple of days without doing much (powerbook was slept a couple of times).

Then, after using it for a period of time, maybe an hour, I noticed that scrolling was slow. I timed it,
using the menubar clock. Clicking in the “page down” part of the scrollbar, it took about 2 seconds
after I clicked before it would actually scroll.

So I launched Quartz Debug to see if it was in a redraw loop, as a previous comment suggested and the
strangest thing happened. I noticed that after I launched Quartz Debug and turned on “Flash screen
updates”, the speed in Eclipse was just fine.

Throughout the rest of the day, every 15-30 minutes it would become slow for typing and scrolling
again. Simply launching and then quitting Quartz Debug returned the performance in Eclipse to
normal. I was able to repeat this at least 3 or 4 more times.

Finally, at the end of the day, I upgraded to Eclipse 3.1RC1. Today, the same thing happened in
3.1RC1, and again launching and quitting Quartz Debug fixed it.

Sure enough launching Quartz Debug sped things back up for me.

So now I have Quartz Debug in my launcher panel. A quick run and quit every so often keeps Eclipse singing. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it certainly makes life better. Now I have no excuse not to get a 17″ powerbook

An updated version of Necessitas (0.3.0) is now available.

Changes (in no particular order):

• updates the the core ivy implementation to 1.1
• allows you to specify (using a comma seperated list) the configurations to use (* or all will be used by default).
• will detect a local ivyconf.xml at the project root and use it instead of the default provided by ivy
• if update on change is selected the classpath will be recalculated if the ivyconf.xml is changed

Note: Ivy 1.1 checks the internet for property updates when it starts up. This may lead to slow eclipse startup times. There is a patch to stop this but I didn’t want to release against a unstable build of ivy. Once a stable version is available I’ll release a quick update.

You can download the latest version via the eclipse update manager from http://eclipse.oneill.id.au/updates/

In a recent interview the principal architect of SWT, Steve Northover, had the following to say

As a developer who has worked on both closed and open source projects all I can tell you is that open source is way more fun. For example, when you fix a bug, you really make someone happy. The feedback is instantaneous. There’s also a great feeling about working in the open. However, these are just my opinions. Personally, I like open source but I don’t presume to tell other people what to do or speculate on corporate strategy.

I couldn’t agree more.

The first public release of Necessitas is now available.

Necessitas is an Eclipse plug-in that adds a class-path container to manage a projects jars using the ivy dependency manager. In short it gives you many of the advantages of ivy without leaving eclipse.

What it does now

• Downloads the declared dependencies to the ivy cache
• Adds the downloaded jars to your class-path
• Can be configured to update the jars each time the ivy.xml file is updated

Still to come

• The ability to specify an ivy config file to use
• The ability to specify the module configuration to use
• Maybe, the ability to automatically download and associate source files

I’ve found a couple of issues in the way that ivy exposes information about what is in the cache, what it needs to download etc. None of these are irresolvable they will just take some time and co-operation with the ivy crew (who are very responsive)

You can download it via the eclipse update manager from http://eclipse.oneill.id.au/updates/

Generating logging information from the eclipse framework is pretty straight forward. Create an .options file and start eclipse with: eclipse -debug <path to your .options file> -vm <path to your jre>\bin\java. The debug information will be written to the console.

For example an .options file with the following contents would log information on the JDT builders:

org.eclipse.jdt.core/debug=true
org.eclipse.jdt.core/debug/builder=true