Month: June 2008

The decline of dinos

No, not a report about the death of dinosaurs many millions of years ago, nor a report about how in fact many dinosaurs didn't die out, but rather evolved into birds... Rather, this blog entry is about dinos which is a Facebook Application written by maxant. Basically, you get a virtual dinosaur which you need to feed. It can also fight or flirt with the dinosaurs of your friends, which directly affects its health. The idea is to keep your dino alive as long as possible. There were several goals in developing it. First of all it was an experiment to see how the Facebook API worked. Second, it was to see how much faster a Facebook application would grow, compared to a normal website, because Facebook gives you  "free website advertising" in terms of being able to invite friends to play your game/application. As such it is a type of viral marketing. The aim is to give it enough momentum that its growth will become exponential. At a minimum, growth should be linear shouldn't it? Well, right from the start, Google Analytics were used to track site traffic. Below are some graphs showing this traffic. The general trend is slow but certain death, much like most original dinosaurs, all those years ago. The point of this blog is not to show that maxant is good at making crap games. Generally speaking Facebook application installations are falling fast, as the novelty wears off. The result is less new people playing…

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OSGi – Just another fad?

In the last few weeks I have heard the term OSGi come up more and more, and one blog posting I read suggested that it was the hot topic of 2008. So I started to research a little. I am currently working heavily with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform building applications which use services deployed to IBM WebSphere. Both these platforms are built up on OSGi (the standard) and both use Eclipse Equinox (an implementation of the standard). So it must be important right? Well you don't have to read too much before you start to get the feeling that you have been there and done that before. One aim of OSGi is to provide a micro kernel for deploying and managing services. Well, from a high level, JMX (MBeans) already does that. Not enough? Well there used to be a project called Apache Avalon Phoenix, which was a mirco kernal and although that project died and was resurrected as Loom from Codehaus (which incidentally has a very interesting history of Apache and Phoenix), it is still the basis of some big projects like the Apache James mail server. Other micro kernals? How about JBoss? There is a good blog article dicussing how JBoss has been based on a micro kernel for some time now. The idea is nothing new and in fact in their case, OSGi does not really go far enough that they could be solely based on it. Actually, doesn't the Java EE EJB specification let you…

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Eclipse Help / Infocenter – External Web Application Mode

Previously in this blog, the Eclipse Help / Infocenter was discussed and details on how to set up the help for an RCP application were given. But often you want to have your help for an application online as well as part of the product, for example if the customer does not have the latest version of the product installed. Indeed the IBM and Eclipse web sites have what they call an Infocenter - an online version of their help system. In reality, when the Eclipse Help System is running, it runs as an embedded web server within your application. So in theory, it should be possible to deploy that as a standard web application. Quoting the Eclipse Help, "The help system can run in three modes: workbench (normal), infocenter, and standalone." Normal is when it is part of your application. Infocenter is when it runs as a seperate process acting as a web server. Standalone is when it is used outside of an RCP application. In fact, from Eclipse 3.4 upwards, it can also be deployed as a standard Java EE web application. The following blog shows how to deploy that help to a standard Java EE web server, namely Tomcat 5.5. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no simple way to get this running. Neither is there any good tutorial showing how to overcome the pitfalls of the descriptions provided in the Eclipse 3.4 Help (search for WAR and you will get the details). Those details…

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Eclipse Help / Infocenter – Workbench Mode

Eclipse offers plugin authors the ability to add Eclipse Help to their plugins. Opening that help will give a nice window with searchable help, something like this (click on the image to see it in full size): The following blog entry shows how to integrate help into an RCP application (or indeed a plugin or feature). The first thing you need to do, is to extend your plugin.xml to tell your plugin that you want to have help. In the source view of your plugin.xml include the following extension points:      To go with these entries, you now need to add the help folder to your plugin project:      The html folder under the help folder contains simple HTML documents for each page of help that you want to write. The toc.xml file is the table of contents which defines what appears in the left pane of the help system when it is opened. The help_contexts.xml file contains mappings from "context names" to files which are relevant for that context. Contexts are used when opening context sensitive help, for example when pushing the F1 button. An example of the toc.xml follows:     <toc label="BookStore"> <topic label="Introduction" href="help/html/general/overview.html"></topic> <topic label="Starting Up" href="help/html/general/startup.html"></topic> <topic label="The Process" href="help/html/general/process.html"></topic> <topic label="Screens"> <topic label="Customers" href="help/html/views/Customers.html"></topic> <topic label="Products" href="help/html/views/Products.html"></topic> </topic> <topic label="Frequently Asked Questions" href="help/html/general/faq.html"></topic> </toc> An example of the help_contexts.xml follows:      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!--==================================================================== Definition of Context-Sensitive-Help (for the F1 Button) ========================================================================--> <contexts> <!--==================================================================== In the code, set the context on the control…

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