Blog comments, my mistakes and good feedback...

Marko Schulz asked me why his comments did not appear in my blog. I checked it and I realized that I had a setup problem with my blog (my mistake). Now all comments are visible and new comments will be shown automatically! I'll check them for spam later.

Here's what I learned from the comments:

• Parsing and verifying hex, octal and decimal numbers...: Several commenters pointed out that I should have used Long#decode(String) and therefore I adjusted the blog entry (and my code ;-).
  
• Am I the only person having problems with the update manager? The answer is clearly: no!
  
• Eclipse was hanging my machine regularly -- solution -XX:MaxPermSize=128m Surya asked if the -XX:MaxPermSize=128m can be put into the eclipse.ini files: the answer is yes.
  
• Why is super.super illegal? is the most debated. Lots of good reasons why super.super is illegal -- but from practical point of view it is annoying...
  
• I hate ClassCastExceptions...Marco said its fixed in 1.5 (ClassCastException is reporting the actual type of the object). I just made a test and it is true: even if compiled with 1.4 and run with 1.5 I see the ClassCastException reporting the type. I'm a bit puzzled why I don't see it in my applications -- I thought I'm using a 1.5 jre.
  
• How to setup some plugins to use java 1.5 in a java 1.4 workspace? Neil Bartlett pointed out that step 3 (Setting the execution environment in the build path to J2SE-1.5) is not needed. I tested it and it is needed. Le ScaL pointed me to an article on execution environment in the eclipse wiki.
  
• Update manager battle: the players Yoxos - YUM - eclipse... Wassim Melhem asks why I like yoxos though I have not seen it in action. Hmm, maybe I'm biased because its German and I know the guys or maybe because I spent some money on it and therefore it "has to be good" ;-). I hope to see an update soon....
  
• How far are the hotels from the eclipse summit October 11-12 2006 in Esslingen/Stuttgart Germany? Gerd Castan suggested to search search hotel.de. Good idea!
  

I checked all comments and I found a few spams, but most comments brought up valid points. Thank you for your feedback!

MDSD/MDA framework openArchitectureWare 4.1 is available at eclipse.org

I just read the announcement that openArchitectureWare 4.1 is available. openArchitectureWare is hosted at eclipse.org/gmt/oaw. It is one of the coolest projects at eclipse.org but it seems not to get much attention. If you are interested in MDSD or MDA take a look at openArchitectureWare - openArchitectureWare is really cool!

Parsing and verifying hex, octal and decimal numbers...

How to parse a number that might be octal, decimal or hexadecimal. Numbers like 0xFF, 0x1e, 077, -123, -0x12, -066. This must have been solved a million times, and here's my version:

Thank you for all the comments! My code is stupid! Use Long.decode(numberString).longValue() Instead!

String sign="";
int base=10;
if(numberString.startsWith("-")) {
    sign="-";
    numberString=numberString.substring(1);
}
if(numberString.startsWith("0x")) {
    numberString=numberString.substring(2);
    base=16;
} else if(numberString.startsWith("0") && numberString.length()>1) {
    numberString=numberString.substring(1);
    base=8;
}
return Long.parseLong(sign+numberString,base);

OK, and here is my VerifyListener:

class NumberVerifyer implements VerifyListener {
    final boolean fSigned;
    NumberVerifyer(boolean signed) {
        fSigned=signed;
    }
    public void verifyText(VerifyEvent e) {
        Text text = ((Text)e.widget);
        StringBuffer fulltext = new StringBuffer(text.getText());
        fulltext.replace(e.start, e.end, e.text);
        String sign=""; //$NON-NLS-1$
        if(fSigned)
            sign="-?"; //$NON-NLS-1$
        e.doit = fulltext.toString().matches(sign+"(0?|[1-9][0-9]*|0x[0-9a-fA-F]*|0[0-7]+)"); //$NON-NLS-1$
    }
}

Vote for the eclipse 3.3 release train name. Europa is a bad choice!

Vote for the Eclipse Release Train Name (2007). There has been some discussions in bugzilla.

I think Europa is a very bad choice for two reasons:

1. There are too many Google hits already if you search for eclipse europa.

2. In many languages Europa means Europe and this will confuse. Messages like the "Europa Build Workshop", sounds for many non-native speakers like "The Build Workshop Europe". If English is your native language, you might not understand this point, but for Germans this is very confusing. For the same reason you would not call a workshop held in the nice Austrian village called Fucking the "Fucking Workshop" ;-)....

Am I the only person having problems with the update manager?

I wonder if I am the only person in the world using the update manager and having problems. Two weeks ago I reported a real show-stopper update manager bug: Update does not work if *ANY* error is found in configuration. I expected that it would be marked as a duplicate but I seem to be the only person having the problem. I cannot finish the updates dialog because of some mysterious errors:



The annoying thing is that "Manage Configuration" seems happy and shows no error:



The error is caused by some installed features that require a specific version of a plugin.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feature id="broken.feature" label="Broken Feature" version="1.0.0">
   <description>.</description><copyright>.</copyright>
   <license>.</license>
   <requires>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.1.2" match="perfect"/>
   </requires>
</feature>

What puzzles me the most is not the bug itself, but the fact I seem to be the only one getting the bug (I get it with 3.2 and 3.3M1).....

If you want to try it, just unzip this feature in your eclipse/feature directory and restart eclipse and try to install a feature using the update manager.

Workarounds
Fix the feature.xml file by removing the required version string.
Or use another working eclipse installation and install the plugins into a new extension location and add the extension location to your eclipse using "Manage Configuration".

Update manager battle: the players Yoxos - YUM - eclipse...

Yoxos

I am very frustrated with the eclipse update manager. In my opinion, it is simply unusable. But what are the alternatives? A few weeks ago, I bought a 1 year subscription of yoxos for $99. Unfortunately, since then, no new updates appeared on my yoxos update manager. The yoxos update manager is quite cool. It's a perspective that allows you to select the plugins you want:



This looks very much like the yoxos on demand site (yes, this is a screenshot of an ajax application!):



I don't know how it works, when new updates are available, but I expect it will work smoothly (well, I payed for it -- therefore it has to work ;-))


TUM - Tikal Update Manager

TUM (Tikal Update Manager) is a open source project forge project called tikal run by Tikal.

They create a dialog with some cool icons. Yoxos seems much more mature, but TUM was just announced....



The Eclipse Update Manager

The eclipse update manager seems also to be enhanced. I have not seen it (because I hope for yoxos to install it for me...), but the screenshots seem promising.



The battle shall start...

I really hope that finally the update manager gets more attention. My favorite is clearly yoxos, because they don't use annoying blocking dialogs, but a perspective. The funny thing is, that eclipse 1 used a perspective as well, and in eclipse 2 it became wizard based...