Playing in the sandbox

If you want to run your code in a secure environment (a sandbox) within control of the JVM Security Manager you can take a look at here. This is particularly interesting for me that I'm quite unaware of the API. For more links about security within the Java Platform, look at this page.

Tracking the crash

Did you remember the bug about the the JVM crashing after running eclipse for a while? The problem seems to be due to a bug well into the JDK. Infact, I've installed Eclipse 3.4 RC4 on my brand new Windows Vista x64 installation and ... bang! Got it! So it is a really multi-platform bug for 64 bit platforms. And I can spare you a google search: it is not fixed yet (JDK 1.6.0_u6) but you may be willing to keep your eyes on it at SUN bugtracker.

Penelope is born!

Penelope is an Aspect-based framework for enhancing Eclipse RCP applications. It leverages several 3rd party products like Equinox Aspects and Guice/Peaberry and aims to provide a way for creating component-based RCP applications using test-driven-approach.

But more importantly, I've finally started to finalize all this Aspect-related stuff in something really useful! Next moves will involve:

• verify the feasability of having a platform-wide injector instead of several for bundle.
• infrastructure for Model-View-Presenter-based development for Eclipse RCP: together with the Presenter-first approach we want to support test-driven development with no excuses! This will require extending the Guice/Peaberry framework with RCP-related support classes.
• support for Eclipse Extensions (possibly in collaboration with Peaberry)
• some kind toolbox integrated within the Eclipse workbench to ease development tasks.

[Solved] Eclipse 3.4 + Ubuntu 8.04 + SUN JDK == Crash

I've been trying to run eclipse 3.4 RC3 on my ubuntu 8.04 64 bit box: nothing. The issues can be tracked to two things:

1. XULRunner should be updated to latest version, otherwise the internal browser will crash, for example when showing the Welcome view.
2. The workbench will crash when attempting compilation of your workspace for the first time. This seems to be related to a bug in the HotSpot of your JRE: if you take a look at the crashlog and see something like:

Current CompileTask:
C2:1504 org.eclipse.core.internal.dtree.DataTreeNode.forwardDeltaWith([Lorg/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/AbstractDataTreeNode;[Lorg/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/AbstractDataTreeNode;Lorg/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/IComparator;)[Lorg/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/AbstractDataTreeNode; (469 bytes)

then, welcome into the club ;)

Fortunately there is a workaround even for this by adding

-XX:CompileCommand=exclude,org/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/DataTreeNode,forwardDeltaWith

in your eclipse.ini JVM options. Kudos to the great community! :D

References

• http://magicalcodingmonkey.blogspot.com/2008/06/eclipse-crash-ubuntu-804-resolution.html
• http://atentia.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/eclipse-crashes-on-ubuntu-804/
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/174759
• https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=214092