See a bug, log a bug

A little word of advice to anyone who thinks they have found a bug in JFace Data Binding. After performing due diligence and the behavior seems to be incorrect, disagrees with the documentation, etc. log a bug. For some there's a tendency to post to the newsgroup with "Is this a bug?" somewhere in the message. This is OK to do but it's not necessary. If you think you have found a bug go ahead and log it to bugzilla. If it ends up not being a bug we'll close it as WONTFIX or INVALID, depending upon what is appropriate. This is actually easier on us, the committers and contributors, as we don't have to monitor multiple outlets for bugs. If you still aren't comfortable with going directly to bugzilla go ahead and post to the newsgroup. But if there is no answer for a day or two go ahead and log it to bugzilla.

Also don't take a resolution of INVALID or WONTFIX as a slap in the face or as anyone saying "you shouldn't have logged this". These are perfectly valid resolutions and are an acceptable way to declare that we disagree with the assertion or that our library is not the appropriate place for the functionality. Basically don't allow these resolutions to keep you from logging other bugs. There is never a negative tone attached to a resolution. If we think that the question should have initially gone to the newsgroup we'll say so. Don't get me wrong, bugzilla is not the newsgroup. You should ask "how do I?" sort of questions there. But if you have found a bug don't hesitate to log it to bugzilla.

Keep up the bug reports, enhancement requests, newsgroup posts, and feedback. We appreciate every bit of it.

QSEclipse Blog

I created a blog for QSEclipse so that I don't end up creating off topic posts here... after this one. I'm not working on the project often but when something frustrates me enough I just can't help myself. When I make releases I'll post to the blog and also try to blog about anything I think is relevant in its development since the Quicksilver APIs are largely undocumented and is not open source.

QSEclipse Blog

EMF Observable Support

One of the recurring requests is for JFace Data Binding IObservable implementations for EMF. A lot of folks out there use EMF for their model and would like to hook that up with all the binding goodness of JFace Data Binding. If you have that itch you might want to follow bug 75625.

Review JFace's data binding design to determine how best to exploit it
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=75625

3.3M6 JFace Data Binding API Changes

3.3M6 was the API freeze and JFace Data Binding had a few changes in regards to API that were necessary for 1.0. All API changes can be found with this query. The most dramatic changes can be found in bugs 175840 and 177463.

175840 - [DataBinding] Remove BindingListener/BindingEvent from the API

The title doesn't quite do this justice. The change that will effect most consumers is that we removed BindSpec and the configuration of bindings has changes because of this. We have introduced 2 new classes to replace BindSpec: UpdateValueStrategy and UpdateListStrategy.

177463 - [DataBinding] SWT Observable API additions

The essence of this change is that all SWTObservables.observe*(...) methods are now untyped meaning they all accept a type of Control. This was done in anticipation of supporting multiple SWT versions. If we were to put the latest and greatest widgets in the method signatures it would prohibit us from using this class with Eclipse 3.2.

Monitoring JFace Data Binding Wiki Changes

Since Eclipsepedia is publishing recent changes I threw together a quick Yahoo Pipe to monitor changes to the JFace Data Binding articles. Our wiki documentation is going to be changing quite a bit and hopefully soon. If interested this is one way to keep track of those changes.

JFace Data Binding Wiki Changes

Update: This isn't working at the moment. When I can find some time I'll update the pipe.

Eclipsepedia Recent Changes Feed

My thanks go out to whoever got this working. When this popped up in NetNewsWire it made my day.

Eclipsepedia
Eclipsepedia Recent Changes

Quicksilver + Eclipse = QSEclipse

This is an off topic post as it has nothing to do with Data Binding so I'll keep it short...

In my spare spare time I've been hacking on a Quicksilver plugin to make it aware of Eclipse workspaces. If you're into Quicksilver and would like to learn more about the plugin head on over to the qseclipse project on Google Code. I consider it alpha but it works. Direct any feedback to the qseclipse Google group.