Ketan's Musings

A reminder to those following Planet Eclipse that there’s a Galileo DemoCamp in Pune on Saturday, 13th June 2009. Sign up on the wiki page so that the ThoughtWorks Pune office is stuffed with enough food to feed you

An Eclipse DemoCamp is a congregation of Eclipse enthusiasts to meet up and demo what they are doing with Eclipse. The demos can be of research projects, Eclipse open source projects, applications based on Eclipse, commercial products using Eclipse or whatever you think might be of interest to the attendees. The only stipulation is that it must be Eclipse related.

There’s a joke about maven downloading half the internet. Apparently p2 talks to the other half maven does not download.

Earlier you’d go get a coffee every time you clicked the eclipse update manager. With the eclipse servers taking a beating and download speeds really going slow you better grab lunch.

But wait there’s another nifty “hack”: Don’t talk to the eclipse servers.

To make the p2 update manager faster (assuming you aren’t downloading from the eclipse mirror sites):

• Edit your hosts file (/etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts)
• Add a fake alias for the download server:

  127.0.0.10 download.eclipse.org
  

Open the update manager again, enjoy the amazing speeds, remember to remove the line if you indeed want to talk to the eclipse servers.

Jruby-in a jar already bundles rspec and rake, so the goal was to find out where it gets packaged.

Download the jruby source zip, extract it and open the build.xml file, search for “rspec” (there’s two occurences) and you’ll find that it’s passed in as an argument to the gem installer, add in another line with “cucumber”:

<target name="install-gems">
  <property name="jruby.home" value="${basedir}"/>
  <java classname="org.jruby.Main" fork="true" maxmemory="${jruby.launch.memory}" failonerror="true">
    <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
    <classpath path="${jruby.classes.dir}"/>
    <sysproperty key="jruby.home" value="${jruby.home}"/>
    <arg value="--command"/>
    <arg value="maybe_install_gems"/>
    <arg value="rspec"/>
    <arg value="rake"/>
    <arg value="cucumber"/> <!-- add cucumber -->
    <arg value="--env-shebang"/>
  </java>
</target>

Then run ant:

$ ant jar-complete

To verify that everything is fine:

$ java -jar lib/jruby-complete.jar -S gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

builder (2.1.2)
cucumber (0.2.3)
diff-lcs (1.1.2)
polyglot (0.2.5)
rake (0.8.4)
rspec (1.2.2)
sources (0.0.1)
term-ansicolor (1.0.3)
treetop (1.2.5)

Great we’ve now managed to package jruby-in-a-jar with some additional gems. Now to run cucumber on jruby in eclipse.

I had an aha moment when I just realized what “people over processes” meant. Read more at the daily WTF!.

The process be praised!

Continuous Integration is a practice where developers frequently integrate their work with others, sometimes multiple times a day. In order to do this, developers do an update-merge-resolve conflict-compile-test-commit, and repeat for best results.

However there are times when you’re making major changes and the ‘commit’ phase in the cycle could break everybody else’s work, but you still need to check in! Here’s how mercurial (or even git) can help:

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