soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Some background first: I have been using eclipse for almost four years now and if there's something which keeps me going back to other editors, it is the word wrapping feature (or its lack of it).

First there was not such a feature, or it was enabled for simple text editors only - not the PHP editor. That meant you had to choose between text highlighting and word wrapping. In practical terms, you ended up ditching eclipse and using another editor, because it's just unpractical to keep remembering which file had long enough lines for deserving word wrapping and opening it with a different editor.

Then somehow the feature appeared but guess what? it's not available if you're using the new PHP plug in, Eclipse PDT, which I'm using because it's better.

I have found a Google Summer Of Code project exclusively dedicated to provide word wrapping in Eclipse. And I don't know if I should be happy or sad that such a thing deserves a project on its own. By reading at the author's blog, it seems there's a horrible mess with the editors. No wonder the options appeared and disappeared in each version.

This experimental plugin works, but it does strange things with the line numbers. The author warns about it so I'm not complaining about that, I'm just pointing at that. And the fact that there are little programs outside there (Crimson Editor, PSPad, TextMate…) which are able to do word wrapping without any fuss. Hey, it's even available with a couple of keystrokes in some programs!

So please Eclipse developers, instead of adding more superfeatures such as folding for and if blocks (which may be useful) could you please focus on this insignificant, apparently irrelevant feature which can become very annoying, specially when editing super long text strings in javascript? (or when trying to highlight a part of a very long line while making sure the mouse keeps on the same line and so it doesn't jump to the next line, thus ruining all the selection and you having to start from the beginning).

It would make all of us super happy and even the world would be a better place.

Please? please? Can I have one for Christmas?

I don't want to write an Eclipse word wrapping, volume 4.

Since I don't have Flash Develop on my mac mini but I have plenty of space because I upgraded its hard disk, I thought it was a good moment to install Eclipse and use it at least for ActionScript3 — although I'm quite tempted of doing the same for PHP stuff; the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plugin for Eclipse is gorgeous.

Anyway, I headed to Eclipse's website, downloaded the package, uncompressed to my /Applications folder. It worked, cool. I downloaded the Flex builder plug in, ran the installation program and discovered to my horror that instead of creating its own folder in the destination folder, it indeed used the destination folder for filling it with its myriad of files. Riiiiiight! There was an Uninstall Flex Builder Plugin.app file somewhere — I saw that!

So I clicked it, waited for the uninstaller to finish… all good, my ~/Applications folder was clean again. Then I clicked again on the Flex Plug in installer and it asked me for my Eclipse folder… and I couldn't find it! Where is it!? Yes: if you uninstall the plugin, it uninstalls everything, including Eclipse.

Luckily I hadn't done anything interesting and in addition I think that the preferences are stored outside the Eclipse folder (somewhere in ~/Library probably). But this is just and plainly wrong, Adobe guys!

I might use Eclipse for something else than Flex, you need to understand it!

I have been a bit disconnected from the Flash scene for a while and it's changed quite a lot! So I thought I may share with you my discoverings while I'm getting updated on the latest news.

There's this new thing called Flex. From what I understand, it will allow you to build entire interactive applications which run both on server and client side, using Flash for the interface.

Roughly, the interesting part here is that not all the processing is ran in the server, but also the client's computer is used to run the application. So, things such as updating graphs are made in the client side, with the data that the server sends you, allowing the server to save processing power and bandwidth.

The interface is specified with an XML based language and the application logic is written with ActionScript2; you can do it with the official Flex editor (even in WYSIWYG mode) or with your favourite IDE with custom XML language schemas support (one example: Eclipse). Then, you drop your code in the Flex server, and it will serve the appropiate interface data to the client depending on their actions.

This concept reminds me a lot to the first .net demonstrations I saw: you write code once and it will be served to the user through the .net server, which will determine the appropiate html and javascript stuff to be sent to the clients depending on their browser capabilities. The problem were the browsers' implementations and their support of javascript. Each time I asked the speakers about this, they never knew what to reply. Such an embarrassing question…

In that, Flex has already won the battle. As it uses the flash player to run in the client, they can guarantee a more or less known scenario and then the developers can build an application knowing for sure that it will always work, and there won't be weird implementations of one javascript method on certain browsers, etc.

It also reminds me to the AJAX approach: do not reload the whole page, send only the useful data, and redraw whatever is needed on the client side. The weak points of AJAX are still the different browsers' implementations, and rich media inabilities: graphics would be great, if all browsers implemented SVG properly. And unfortunately, browsers are unable to play sounds just by using html/javascript: as far as I know, when someone needs to play a sound nowadays, they end using a Flash object to play it (and yes, I'm ignoring the MIDI at all).

The advantage of AJAX versus Flex is that you don't need all the human and technical infrastructure that a Flex server requires. It is way cheaper to start building things with the Ajax philosophy (see ruby on rails), and honestly, most of the applications don't really need to have fancy 3d realtime graphics with motion blur and stereo surround sound.

Conclussion? Flex looks promising but it has its own application field, which can fulfill very appropiately. For relatively low-demanding requirements applications, there are other solutions which can work (and are working, indeed) pretty well.

Of course I might have misunderstood something. If there's something you feel is wrong please do not hesitate to leave a comment and I'll correct it.

Extra final bonus

Finally, if you are really curious and want to know some hidden and technical details about how the flash player is implemented -which is what at the end is going to affect everybody: you and your users- take a look at kaourantin.net. That's the blog of one of the engineers at Macromedia/Adobe developing the Flash player. He will get you informed about the changes they make and, from time to time, those little secrets that might explain certain flash oddities.

Although they fixed the word wrap thingie in latest versions of Eclipse (did they read my desperate call, maybe?), I still miss a pair of good features:

1. split the editor view in two, having let's say two subwindows inside the current one, and then being able to see the same file twice but at different parts. Or maybe, to be able to see two different files in the splitted view. Currently I am just able to switch between files with tabs, which are nice but sometimes I would like to have everything in screen at the same time.
2. change the editor font. I am bored with Courier New, there are better fonts for showing source code, and although I have been looking around all the possible preferences I thought of (I take this opportunity to remark that the preferences Pane is horribly messy and confusing… I always get lost at it… where was that option? was under php? or under general editors?), I haven't been able to find where to change the font. Ok, you can change the style (color, bold, italic) but not the font. I want my Lucida Console back!

These features are present in another IDE's like Visual Studio or XCode, and they increase [my] productivity, so I don't find any reason to not to have them in this one. Specially if their developers really want it to be superwidespread.

Which powerfeature would you add to Eclipse?

How can it be possible that somebody decides to develop a code editor without word wrapping? Am I expected to wrap each line manually? For god's sake! We are on 2005! Even notepad does it!

I even tried to update the php editor to the latest version, and the option still didn't appear anywhere. I tried to search on forums… nobody had a good answer. Some of the people even added a screenshot to demonstrate that the option appeared for some computers, but the best of all is that each screenshot featured different options for the same editor. Now, that's what I call an uniform interface design, when the suggested solutions are associate php files to external text editors! Then, why should I install the Java Virtual Machine and Eclipse, if I finally have to use dreamweaver for editing php files?

Bah!