Friday, June 28, 2013

Cheating on Bucky & Is that a component behind that tree?

Cheating on Bucky

How do you go about learning something new? The intuitive approach is to read all you can grab about a topic. I tend to do this myself. In the case of buckminster the newbie is for sure not left in the dark. There is a free downloadable book and the wiki is undoubtedly one of the better wiki's covering an Eclipse technology topic.

Personally  I tend to get impatient to get going after some reading, and want to try out and get going for my needs. This is a pitfall, which can lead to long lasting trial-and-error sessions. One should really be able to recognize trial-and-error, step-back and say...oh now... I need to learn this thing before spending more time fiddling around. In the case of learning Bucky, this is exactly what happend, so I decided to create a Cheat Sheet, which would present the big bucky picture and at the same time hold sufficient details. As we all know, when writing and drawing, the best learning happens. The brain sucks it in like a sponge!

The first version can be found here , it's not been reviewed by a Buckminster authority, so please use it at your own risk!

Is that a component behind that tree?

Wow, what a relieve. I feel I master buckminster, and ready to build all components in the world. The actual setup of buckminster artifacts like cquery, rmap  etc... for NetXStudio , came with a different challenge, more precisely setting up the .rmap to locate components and getting the correct locator URL    came with surprises, I would like to share here.

This is my 3.x shopping list:

- Eclipse Platform + RCP ( I need the .ide plugin for various reasons).
- Eclipse EMF 2.something.
- Eclipse EMF/CDO 4.2 (And actually 4.0 first).
- Eclipse GEF/Draw2d/Zest
- Eclipse Nebula widgets.
- Eclipse Xtext 2.something.
- Eclipse Xpand, Xtend and MWE, tricky stuff, as these components are getting old..
- Google Collect/Inject
- Apache various libs, the usual suspects... (I am sure you know them).
- Apache POI for reading/writing certain spreadsheet formats.
- Javax stuff, like persistence API.
- SWT Chart, a nice and well documented charting widget.
-.... the ones I can't think of right now.

Here started my venture, I needed to walk through the forest of projects publishing there components, and pick the ones I needed. I also need to pick a component reader. Which is luckily very often p2 so it was a quick win. One question pops up all the time, why don't I download this thingy, push it up my Git repo, and then resolve it from my workspace? I could do that for the whole component list, above, but obviously this has some drawbacks:

  • I would keep a shadow of already managed and published components. 
  • I won't be continuously integrating. (Do I actually really want that?). 
So resisting the "self-push-into-github-components-I-need-temptation", I took out my torch, put on a helmet and went URL hunting. ( I recommend to bring a large cup of Cappuccino and don't forget to let friends and family know, you will be away for a while). 

Resolving Platform

For the platform, I found this:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Project_Update_Sites

It has P2 sites for older releases, and the latest and greatest in flavour Milestone, Integration, Nightly
Note, not to confuse the Simultaneous releases hold the p2 repositories which bundle many Eclipse components in one single well-known p2 (i.e Juno, Indigo etc..).

Resolving EMF

Next up is EMF. Now EMF is rock solid. With great amusement, I follow the occasional attempt on the EMF forum to talk "it" into incorrect behavior. This usually fails, and rarely a fix is needed.
But how about that p2 URL, well sofar the main p2 advised from the download page is this:

http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/updates/releases/

Now that's weird, pasting this p2 link into the IDE, I only see older EMF releases. In the case of EMF, Id' like to get the latest stable, let's say 2.8....but where is the p2 URL? I can download it as a whole, but no p2 can be located.... Perhaps I can tell bucky to link to the p2 in .zip format with this:

I dug around and wondered, with CI, there must be tons of projects requiring EMF, so how do they do it. The .rmap from CDO gave it away, here is the URL they use:

http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/emf/updates/

This can be used in p2 in the IDE without problems. Now notice the fact that emf fragment is stated twice in the URL Where is this documented...? No answers for now, the URL can be specified in more granular form, by appending a release i.e "2.9-I-build" this would give you that specific integration build. At this very moment, I haven't figured out what the pattern is. Appending 2.8.1 for example is not a valid p2 URL. 


Resolving EMF Compare

Next up is the EMF Compare, now this is used by xtext to diff models, so depending on the Xtext version, there will be a dependency on EMF Compare version x.x. In my case, this was 1.2, unfortunately the packaging in 2.0 changed, so simply pointing to 2.0 Update site, didn't work. I had to point to an older release, luckily available in p2 format.

This is the URL, I ended up using:

Resolving M2T (Xpand/Xtend)

These buggers are available from the Model 2 Text project. In my case, I need some older releases, which are archived and not available in p2. (The zipped p2 URL isn't accepted as a valida repo, when pointing directly). The archive can be extruded on the server, but in this case, I felt more confortable to import the projects in my workspace, and commit to Git. (Yes, in this case, I didn't resist self-managed).

Resolving Xtext

This was pretty easy, at least that's what I thought.... The Xtext URL for p2 is this:


this will get you the latest Xtext, which is fine, however the generated Xtext editor has optional dependencies which have to do with Xtext builders and code generators. It ends up needing (optionally) the JDT , ltk, emf.codegen and more...., which I don't want in a runtime. Although Buckminster will recognize these as optional, if resolved it will also try to resolve the dependencies from the children, which might not succeed. This is when an advisor node in the .cquery comes in handy. Just skip the child components from optional plugin-dependencies.

There is also a Composite Release URL, which seems to contain everything from Itemis.
This is the one:

http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/xtext/updates/composite/releases/

I haven't tried, it but I think with the p2 reader, it's possible to point to specific categories of the p2 repo.

Done! well that's what I thought

So finally the sweet smell of success, all my components are resolved, and no more little red dots in the !

Give me more! 


What is left is tons of wishes, How do I add my unit tests?, can I produce the javadoc?, I actually want to publish the help as wiki, html and pdf... All those cool things... I am sure I'll find solutions for all these challenges in the time to come.....