Survey on Eclipse XSLT Tools

As the current maintainer of the XSL Tools at Eclipse, I'd like to hear from the potential user base - how do you like it, and which kind of features are you looking for?

To do that, I've made a survey around the use of XSLT and the Eclipse XSLT tools. It's completely anonymous and not very long.

Please consider taking the survey even if you do not use the Eclipse XSLT tools already -- the survey is on your general XSLT use, and interest in 2.0 and 3.0 features as well.

I will summarise the result and post them back here, when available.

The survey is at: http://srvy.it/14jOlzb

Please also feel free to forward the survey link and plea above to other XSLT users that you may know of, or advertise on XSLT-related blogs.

Thank you in advance!

Where's my Juno SR2?

A colleague of mine just asked - what happened to Eclipse Juno SR2 - wasn't it due out last week?
Yes it was, but one or more serious problem was discovered at the last minute. I, for one, prefer a healthy release one week later to a data-corrupting release one week sooner!

While the busy release bees are working on assembling the best possible Juno SR2, take a moment to appreciate this list of fixes, or contribute back to Eclipse by improving bug information, like in this case.
Or, become a friend of Eclipse!

Survey about accepting patches within the Eclipse community

As was evident with the recent discussions on E4 performance, the ongoing process to keep the Eclipse community vibrant, and keep relevant projects alive, we Eclipse-people should reach out for all the help we can get. One kind of help is the actual code being contributed.

DongGyun is conducting research in the dynamics of open source communities, and is running a survey into the criteria for accepting patches within the Eclipse community. I find this a worthwhile investigation, and I hope you don't mind me forwarding his plea here (if you've already answered it, please ignore):

Dear Eclipse Developers,

This is DongGyun, a MPhil student of Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology(HKUST).

We are currently conducting research to identify more/less important criteria to accept/reject patches. As a developer, would you like to participate this short survey (only 2 questions) to let us know the importance of criteria and how easy/hard to get the criteria information.

http://www.cse.ust.hk/~handk/eclipse/survey.html

We will share these survey results to the Eclipse developer community and other software engineering communities.

We really appreciate your help.

DongGyun, Han
http://www.cse.ust.hk/~handk

Stuff you learn about when it breaks

Somewhere in my basement I have a copy of Winograd and Flores' Understanding Computers and Cognition, required reading in some late-1990'es HCI course. Just about the only thing I remember from that book is this quote: "The word processor exists as a collection of hardware or programs only when it breaks down." This is in the sense that you don't think about a tool which doesn't get in the way, and only when it fails (or is missing), you notice it and start to analyse it.

Fast forward some 13 years, a few days ago, I finally got around to writing some better UI tests of WTP's "XPath View", using SWTBot as the weapon of choice. Having read the SWTBot getting started docs and some useful blog posts, writing my tests were soon well underway, using the fluent API provided. It is fun to watch the application speeding along like time-lapse film, like magic.

Everything went fine until I wrote code to switch the XPath view's active process from XPath1.0 to XPath2.0, using the view's menu. The API was pretty easy to figure out, but the view menu finder just didn't pick up the menu item I wanted.

There's my breakdown: Why?

Well, it turns out that unlike regular menus and context menus, view menus are collected in a different fashion by SWTBot, by examining the contributions rather than enumerating the SWT objects themselves. Some corners cases are not covered. Not a big deal, really, but it made me look at the source for SWTBot, which is quite a pleasant sight. Now it exists as real code in my mind, as does the Eclipse command framework implementation. And I also now "get" the Hamcrest Matcher framework which I've previously thought to be horribly over-engineered.

With my new knowledge, I can even extend SWTBot. Nice.

Then fast forward two more days, while this blog post was sitting half-finished in my browser, Saturday evening, after historic amounts of rain in the area, my basement was flooded: The sewer couldn't contain the rain, and the system broke down and came very much into existence, as sewage water gushed up from the drains and toilet and my otherwise dry basement became a 20cm deep paddling pool, allover. Getting the water out took hours; getting the smell out will take days, maybe weeks.

Like software, sewage is something most people would rather not have to deal with. It's supposed to be "invisible magic", but in reality it is messy and complicated, and when it doesn't work, it makes for a shitty situation -- yet our society very much depends on it.

The really strange part is the book: I haven't found it yet, not in the "dry" pile, the "slightly damp but fine" pile, the "soggy yet perhaps readable" pile, or the "discard" pile. I know that book must be down there somewhere, and when I find it, it's going back into my reading queue right away.

P.S: My flooded basement was a picnic compared to the flood in Pakistan. Consider donating to your favorite charity!

Autonomy, Mastery, and bug 313989

Dear diary: About a week ago, I took out a full 10 minutes from my day job to watch an interesting video on YouTube about what motivates people, as recommended by David Carver.

The video explains what might motivate people (who typically hold a challenging and rewarding day job) to contribute their efforts, for free, to open source projects, and it really got me thinking (spoiler alert -- go watch it first): The video concentrates on three significant drivers for motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and a Sense of Purpose. I considered this is terms of my WTP interests:

• "Autonomy" is right on target: Nobody told me to get involved with web tooling in Eclipse, this is purely an itch. For a free-time contributor, I believed I scratched my itch really good.
• "Mastery" is on target too, since nothing teaches you a spec(*) as well as trying to implement it, or filing a bug against said implementation. It's nerdy, but rewarding!
• "A Sense of Purpose" is a bit more difficult... What is the purpose of contributing to an open source project, anyway? Is it ... mastery for the sake of professional/career development? ... just "scratching an itch"? ... to improve the quality of a common resource? ... to earn the respect of my peers? ... to make the lives of users (other developers) easier? I'm not sure I have a clear answer on this one, but it got me thinking.
  

I wouldn't have taken as much notice if my watching this video didn't coincide with the WTP 3.2 RC2 build, which I took for a spin, and found three really annoying defects (bug 313989 being the most trivial of those). These bugs weren't really enough to warrant PMC reviews and all that process, but to me, they felt just like when you notice the first scratch on the paint of your brand new car: Sure, you realise it's probably going to get worse -- but you would have preferred not to know about it.

The point is this: I should have found those bugs earlier! If I hadn't been so busy investigating all kinds of other unrelated, non-WTP stuff (issues in Xalan and Hibernate, besides investigating how face recognition works, just because...) I could have done much better! Boom, there goes my sense of purpose, no matter how I look at it: Lost in unfocused dabbling.

So my conclusion was this: The "sense of purpose" motivating me to work with WTP is to develop the best IDE for working with XML schemas and documents, and to make our XPath2 implementation consumable for the likely adopters.
My open source effort will be concentrated on that (WTP+XML) for the next two years: Make it to the New and Noteworthy. So while I might take other tools for a spin (Xtext rocks!), those other projects shouldn't wait up for patches from me -- for the next two years.

P.S. And dear diary: I promise to write more often.

*: XML, XML Schema 1.0, SOAP 1.1, XML Catalog, XPath 2.0, XSLT 1 & 2, XML Schema 1.1, the list goes on.

Random acts of kindness

With Helios M6 in the mold, now is the time to send a big 'thank you' to the ladies and gentlemen making all this possible, the unsung heroes of the more-or-less-oiled machinery called 'build', the closing-time-panic induced commitathoners, the map-file conflictinators, the cooler of the cool 'hope-the-next-build-will-be-green'-cats, the ... well you know who you are!

Thank you all very much!

For those of you going to EclipseCon this year, I recommend buying a pint for your build-wizard. But don't overdo it in case somebody (could be me) breaks a build somewhere!

Red Clown-Nose Game

I love games, I really do. Just the other day, I found out I was in a game I didn't even know about. It's called the The Continuous Integration Game, and it's played on the Hudson instance on build.eclipse.org. And guess what, because I keep breaking the psychopath (XPath2) build, I'm placed almost at the bottom (that earns me -10 points), and dcarver who keeps fixing the build afterwards, is almost at the top (since a successful build gives +1 point and adding a test suite gives +1 per test. And who added the 8000+ tests from the W3C suite?)

I certainly have room for improvement - let the games begin!