Tech Life of Recht

It’s been a while, but thanks to a couple of contributions, I finally managed to release the next version of the Hudson plugin for Eclipse, this time version 1.0.8. There are a couple of new features: Non-blocking refreshes, Date and time-information for the builds, support for HTTP Basic Auth, and a couple of bugfixes. Check out the changelog and download at http://code.google.com/p/hudson-eclipse/.

I recently decided to switch from regular Eclipse to the SpringSource Tool Suite, as we do quite a lot of Spring projects, and not having auto-completion in the XML files is kinda stupid. This also meant upgrading from Eclipse 3.4 to 3.5, and this is where I accidentally ran into the best feature addition ever – or more appropriately, the best usability fix ever, although I don’t actually know if this is just a feature of the STS. In that case, there’s another argument for using it.
The problem in the older versions was that if you had a number of tabs open, you could switch between them using the more or less standardized Ctrl+PageUp/Down, which was nice. However, if one of the tabs contained so-called minitabs, like XML documents or Properties files do, you’d be stuck in these tabs, and Ctrl+PageUp/Down would switch between the minitabs, which was with quite an amount of certainty not what you wanted. This has now changed, so Ctrl+PageUp/Down only changes between the top-level tabs.

The gain in productivity is almost infinite…

It seems there were a couple of regressions in the 1.0.6 version of the Hudson plugin for Eclipse. The new version checked for valid build status values, but apparently, I didn’t quite get all the values right, which resulted in a NPE when starting the plugin.

A couple of other small fixes were also applied, so I’ve released version 1.0.7. Download at Google Code or use the update site.

I just spent the evening implementing 3 new features in the Hudson Eclipse plugin. All three were requested in the issue tracker, and the requests even had patches attached, so it wasn’t too much work. Thanks very much to all the contributors.
The new features are:

• Display build health along with build status
• Make it possible to set parameters when launching a parameterized build. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to read the necessary parameters from the xml interface, but I’ve created a feature request, so hopefully it will be added to Hudson soon.
• It’s now possible to detect any running Hudson instances using network broadcasting. This only works for local network. So see in action, go to the preferences page and click “Discover”.

As usual, the new version can be downloaded from the project site, or using the Eclipse update manager.

You probably thought it would never happen, but I finally got a couple of hours for making a new version of the Hudson plugin for Eclipse. There are no major feature additions (other than support for form-based authentication), but all the reported issues should be fixed now. Check out the changelog at Google Code where the new version can also be downloaded. The update site should have the new version.

If you have any suggestions, comments, or bug reports, please use the issue tracker.

Enjoy!

It’s been some time since the last update, but now I finally got around to do some updates for my Hudson plugin for Eclipse. A couple of new features have been added:

• Name filtering
• Support for Hudson views

Other than that, some smaller bugs have been fixed, and the quite annoying error dialog when Hudson can’t be reached doesn’t appear anymore unless configured to do so.

The new version, 1.0.4, can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/hudson-eclipse/. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Patches are even more welcome.

There's been a lot of discussion about how to include closures in Java7, and whether they should be included at all or not. Everybody seems to agree that Java already has the poor man's version of closures: anonymous inner classes.
Here's my proposal on how to implement "real" closures: create a folding plugin for Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ which simply folds

into

Syntax borrowed from Groovy, but any would do. 100% backwards compatibility for free, no compiler modifications needed, support for all Java versions, just with a couple of plugins. Yes, it's cheating, but I don't care, it's been years since I wrote a line of Java code without Eclipse or something like it.

I would do it myself, but I my backlog of ideas to implement is big enough as it is, so if someone else should have the time, please go ahead.

Version 1.0.3 of the Hudson plugin for Eclipse is out. New features:

• Read proxy settings from the Eclipse configuration
• Support self-signed certificates
• Store icons in ImageRegistry to avoid leaks

Enjoy.

I've just released a new version of the Hudson plugin for Eclipse. This version fixes the somewhat confusing default setting, where all build types were filtered out. Now, all projects should be listed by default.
I've also added an ignore option to each project. By right-clicking on a project, it's possible to ignore build errors. This will make the status icon at the bottom of the window green even if there is a build error in a project. This is useful when there are several projects, but you only work on some of them yourself.
The new version can be installed using the update site, or it can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/hudson-eclipse.

I finally got around to moving the code for the Hudson Eclipse plugin to a public place: http://code.google.com/p/hudson-eclipse. That means there's now a proper update site and a place to look for documentation and issues. So, please file any suggestions or issues, or even better, check out the code and make your changes.