Pythoneering

Eclipse Europa became available to the world on 29 June, and I’ve spent a few happy hours exploring what it can do.

My standard Eclipse set-up consists of the Eclipse SDK, DTP and the Derby plugin for database-related stuff, WTP for web-related stuff, Subversive for version control and PyDev for Python programming. Installation of Europa has upgraded the main SDK to version 3.3, DTP to version 1.5 and WTP to version 2.0.

So, what do I think of it so far? Overall, it looks more like an evolution than a revolution, with a large number of small additions and changes. None of these are particularly dramatic in their impact, but the cumulative effect is rather pleasing. Features I particularly like include

• Streamlined workspace switching
• The new minimize/maximize behaviour, which allows more flexible use of screen real estate
• The ability to toggle display of invisible whitespace (handy for Python code)
• Grouping of referenced JAR files under a single node in Package Explorer - much tidier!
• The ability to hide the Console view and have it reappear whenever the program writes to the standard output or standard error streams

I haven’t had much opportunity to examine the changes in WTP yet, but DTP certainly seems to have improved significantly. There is now good support for HSQLDB and PostgreSQL, and query results can be displayed in either tabular or textual formats. One particularly nice new feature is a wizard for creating tables. To be precise, it generates the SQL DDL commands to create a table, and these can then be executed in the normal way, or saved to a file for future use.

I’ve encountered two problems, one minor, the other less so. The minor issue is with the Welcome screen. On my system (Ubuntu ‘Edgy’ Linux, AMD 64), I don’t get the nice graphical version, just this:

Perhaps the Welcome screen is constructed using HTML and CSS, and there’s some problem with the CSS? In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any problem with the 32-bit Linux version, which displays the Welcome screen just fine on my PC at work.

The more serious issue (on my home PC, at least) is stability. Eclipse 3.2.2 was rock-solid for me, but 3.3 has locked up a few times already. I’m going to experiment with increasing memory allocation to see if that solves the problem.

It’s that time of the year again, when our final-year students begin their project work. In the run-up to project selection, it was tremendously encouraging to see how many of them were keen on using Python in general, and the Django framework in particular. And it now looks like two or maybe three of my four students will be making significant use of Django. Java doesn’t go unrepresented either, with one student planning on doing interesting things with Eclipse and version control.

Anyway, I hope all of my guys get stuck in and do some good work. Projects that go well can be as rewarding for the supervisor as they are for the student!

Filed an Eclipse bug today. Nothing show-stopping - just an annoying little problem with how the Javadoc view displays the doc comment for a class. It’s Bug 159775 in Bugzilla