Collecting data and information in an information management system is only half the story. An important aspect is also the ability to create visualization or printable documents based on the data in such a system, in other words, reporting. Since a few builds we’re shipping the runtime of the Reporting engine BIRT with the initial download. Since BIRT allows an easy integration of custom data sources we decided to write our own ODA driver (which is part of the Eclipse DTP Connectivity Framework) which lets you build queries that are executed against your local workspace. In the following I’ll show you how to use the integrated BIRT capabilities and two showcases how Reporting can fit into an information management system. (more…)

Mylar 1.0 was released. Reason enough to checkout the plugin and test the functionalities. The Project is a task focused extension for coupling tasks with units of work or resources in your Eclipse IDE. The main goal of Mylar is to associate your work with tasks from a task repository and the monitoring of your work. Dependend from your activity mylar tries to focus ui elements that are responsible for you and hides all the things that are not important for resolving the current task.

(more…)

Eclipse BIRT is a reporting API and designer for “rapid reporting creation” . In nearly every application you have the requirement to generate different reports in different output formats. A colleague was faced with that requirement on a J2EE Application and we decided to try BIRT to see if it’s already in a state where you can use it on “real” projects. In the following I want to share my experience with BIRT in that project.

The requirement was the analysis of a questionnaire with a chart. A common use-case. The team already had experiences with Jasper Reports and iText.

(more…)

A common usecase is running long processes and waiting for their completion. Therefore responsiveness is an important feature, that can be realized with the jobs-framework provided by eclipse. The user wants to continue working while a long running job is scheduled, not sitting in front of a frozen UI that is not responding until the job has finished.

Today I want to demonstrate some key features of the jobs api and encourage RCP developers to use the functionality to make a user friendly interaction and a clear management of your application-specific jobs. A good article for this topic you can find on the eclipse-website.

(more…)

Every RCP-Developer is familiar with this question. From a technical view the differences are very well explained by the authors from the eclipse3.0 faq. But is this really helpful? - Which criteria are really important in deciding which graphical components you’ll use? In this article I’ll share my experiences and decisions regarding views and editors.

(more…)