http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/10/25/integrating-google-maps-into-web-application.html

Anyone familiar with WMC, WED, Lotus Expeditor, or any Eclipse based product for that matter may have seen different behaviors in the platform when attempting to use third part plug-ins or features. The soon to be released Lotus Expeditor will be shipping in a mode that prevents third party plug-ins from being “copied” into the plug-ins directory and loaded. This will make security much tighter with Expeditor and then Hannover installations because it forces the product to install the plug-ins from a hopefully secured source (like a locked-down update site). There are also additional measures Expeditor will be going to in order to keep a safe and happy platform but I will not go into those right now.

I got pinged quite a bit in the past month or so about “why can’t I just copy the plug-ins into the plug-ins directory?”. The problem is test and development used that method to quickly deploy a patch to others. Not knowing the “innards” of how this worked I googled and found a lot of information about the concept.

All of this can be referenced in Eclipse bug 53858.

Apparently there are three modes the platform can run in.

• USER-INCLUDE
• USER-EXCLUDE
• MANAGED-ONLY

The MANAGED_ONLY mode looks like it was added late last year to accommodate many “lock-down” based requirements. Here is an excerpt from the bug in bugzilla:

The RCP framework emphasizes the ability to share INSTALL locations among
different "applications". Each application can choose a subset of the features
installed in the INSTALL locations. Currently, the only way to do this is to
set the "/site/policy" attribute to "USER-INCLUDE" or "USER-EXCLUDE" in
platform.xml and populate the "site/list" attribute with plug-ins. This is
prohibitively complex. In particular, "USER-EXCLUDE" requires constant
management to reflect the current list of plug-ins in the INSTALL location. It
also requires that developers of "application" features have some knowledge of
how eclipse has been installed on the client machine.

Adding a "MANAGED-ONLY" setting to the "site/policy" attribute would simplify
this process. Under "MANAGED-ONLY" mode, only those plug-ins referenced by
features that are enabled features would be available to the application. This
would be relatively easy for the framework to derive and would provide a
straight forward way to select which plug-ins are available in an individual
application.

So in your platform.xml you should see one of these variables. If you are in fact testing or developing and “want” to drop plug-ins you can probably just change the platform.xml with the behavior you want. I assume you will probably have to run with -clean after a change like this.

Sample plugin.xml
-

-
policy=”MANAGED-ONLY“ updateable=”true” url=“file:../rcp/eclipse/”>

I viewed this posting just to see if any of the games on the list were ones I liked or have played before. #7 Superman 64 was definitely one of the worst games I had ever played. I always liked Superman and when it came out for Nintendo 64 I was very excited. It was the worst gaming experience I had ever seen. It was extremely difficult to control him in the 3D space, the graphics were well below average and Superman looked like Handyman when he changed flying direction.

I posted two postings in a row about addiction… Maybe something inside of me is telling me something…

I hear many times from my wife that I always want to find a solution to her problems and never just want to listen. I realized this last week during the final days of Expeditor 6.1 that I believe I am addicted to solving problems. I just closed a complicated problem in another developers area and for some reason I feel I hit a home run in the world series. This has happened all week long and each problem I fixed I felt great. Why? Is it because I think I am doing my share or helping out with solutions? The Internet seems to think it is mens natural way of dominating…

“Women saw women as better problem-solvers. Men saw men as better problem-solvers” – Management Issues

I have heard that men in general are problem solvers so I searched Google and of course I had a million hits. I read a bunch of postings, articles and information on the web about this addiction and realized that it is not an addiction, it is just nature. So now I will go on an feel good when I solve problems. And if my wife throws this “character flaw” at me in the future I can simply respond that is how men are wired.

I know when I used Thunderbird or that other POP client I constantly hit the “Get Mail” button. Now, in the latest Lotus Notes template I have a button that does the same thing and I am already clicking is constantly.

Of course I do not know if this will make it into Hannover or Lotus Notes 7.x but I love the new UI and it seems to evolve daily as we eat our own dog food. I am so pleased that IBM is investing heavily into client technologies, otherwise I would be looking for work.

I just read this posting on Slashdot and I think as long as the software only runs when the game runs then it is part of the package. If it installs some kind of daemon or service then I think it needs to be an optional installation piece.

Reference:

Battlefield 2142 to Bundle Spyware?, Slashdot.org, link http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/1319235

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead

I just had to implement something what I consider should be part of the extended class. In Eclipse wizards you can create panels and then have validation on those panels. I would say 99.9 percent of the time, if not more, you will want all of the fields that are required, validated. So I think the base class, in this case it is OptionTemplateSection, there should be implemented a common set of code that validates all of the required fields on the page are filled in. The code below is probably in almost every validateOptions() method that implements this. You can see the code is pretty generic and if the options are required then you need to flag an error.

I would prefer the OptionTemplateSection implements the abstract method validateOptions() from class BaseOptionTemplateSection.

My main workstation is brutally used daily for coding, email, and everything else work related. The biggest problem I have is I have to download new builds almost daily for possibly several streams – resulting in 300-400 MB downloads daily. Over time this has made my hard drive extremely fragmented, almost completely fragmented… Yesterday I started to de-fragment my drive. After 14 hours and kicking it off 3 different times I started to see somewhat good results. One big problem that remained, even after the three de-frags was my Lotus Notes mail file – 4.8GB and over 4700 fragments. By the end of the defrags it was down to about 3100 fragments. Now that my drive was cleaned and I have over 40% free space I ran ncompact -c on my local mail file. This does a full file copy compact, meaning it creates a temporary file to do the compaction – much better than a normal compact.

In the end – my drive has zero fragments and my mail file is in one happy chunk! Now for another week of fragmenting the drive…