Cheat Sheet Editor

Eclipse Europa (3.3) has a new Cheat Sheet Editor which is a vast improvement over the XML editor used in the Calipso (3.2) release.

1. Create a cheat sheet, File->New->Other...->User Assistance->Cheat Sheets.
2. Enter a filename and click Finish.

The new Cheat Sheet Editor will appear. Select the Item and you will see the definition and command sections appear to the right. Click the Browse... button to see the new Command Composer.

The Command Composer shows a list of available commands and their parameters. Gone are the days of hunting through eclipse plugin.xml files looking for command ids.

1. In the Command Composer, select Window->Preferences.
2. Use the Preference Page combo box to select General->Editors->File Associations.
3. Click OK.

You now have a cheat sheet item which will display the File Association preference page.

If you want to see what happens inside Eclipse, display the ParameterizedCommand class and set a break point at executeWithChecks(Object, Object). Now run your application in debug mode, display your cheat sheet and press "Click to perform".

The command org.eclipse.ui.window.preferences is defined in org.eclipse.ui/plugin.xml. Its default handler is ShowPreferencePageHandler which is found in the org.eclipse.ui.workbench plugin.

Read up on the following extension points and use the ShowPreferencePageHandler as an template to build your own commands that can be accessed from a cheat sheet. See New menu contribution extension for readings on how to use a command in a menu, toolbar, or popup menu.

org.eclipse.ui.commands

A logical representation of a task. A handler does the work. See wiki and help guide.

org.eclipse.ui.handlers

A handler does what the command represents. See wiki and help guide.

Europa help, gone without a trace

The org.eclipse.help* plugins have had all of the tracing features removed for the Europa release. Why? Only this bug 197335 report will possibly tell.

They did leave the .options file in the plugins so that your run configuration appears to support help tracing. It doesn't so don't waste your time trying.

What you can do is set a break point in org.eclipse.help.HelpSystem.getContext(String). It will show you the help context id being used. Most problems are due to simple typos in your help *.xml file or in your view/editor/dialog call to PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getHelpSystem().setHelp(Control, String).

I come to praise TPTP and bury it

I tried out the new TPTP (Test & Performance Tools Platform) tool yesterday. In the end I was able to get it to work but there are a number of very annoying problems.

The first issue is the new monitor page in the run configuration will randomly forget its settings. If Memory Analysis is selected make sure you edit its options to track object allocation sites. Otherwise you'll have a hard time tracing object allocation back to your source code.

The big issue is with the Java Profiling options. Manually setting a content filter set does not work as expected. The Default filter set does not work as expected (already reported to Eclipse). The filter below hides all org* classes instead of only showing org.apache* classes.

    org*                 *    EXCLUDE
    org.apache*          *    INCLUDE

Specify the filter below worked only for me in our group.

    com.kelman.*         *    INCLUDE

Everyone else had to use the following.

    com.kelman*         *    INCLUDE

The potential issue is Java 1.6 is not supported by TPTP. For the project I'm working on it is not an issue since Java 1.5 works extremely well for us.

The documentation for TPTP is overly complex for someone wanting to simply run an application and do a bit of performance analysis.

Now that I've buried TPTP its time for a bit of praise.

Once we figured out the monitor configuration problems the tool worked like a charm. A great new feature is the integration of the Agent Controller. If you are debugging an application on a local machine, TPTP will start the Agent Controller. No more worries about installing and managing the Agent Controller as a service.

TPTP by default tries to show you as little as possible. I think this is a good thing. It keeps TPTP responsive and forces you to think hard about what packages or classes should be included in the performance analysis.