This is an interesting thing I ran across when dealing with JRuby 1.1.4 and Swing - some of this may be just my lack of understanding of some of the Java integration features, some of it may be lingering bugs in the Java integration, and some of it may just be what has to be done to make it work; anyway - here goes.

JRuby 1.1.4 has been released.

There are a huge number of repairs and performance improvements related to the Java integration in this release. This is great for me, as I have hit some real stumbling blocks trying to build Swing GUIs with JRuby 1.1.3, and the bugs I was being tripped up by, have been fixed.

Highlights after the break:

When coding in Eclipse RCP or, for that matter, any JFace based UI, you often times are implementing viewers, which require a content provider and a label provider. In most cases, you’re dealing with the IStructuredContentProvider API, which would be appropriate for both the ListViewer and TableViewer classes.

If you have a need to populate these views with data that is effectively static, you can use the org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ArrayContentProvider class to get you up and running quickly; and it is really quite functional in many cases.

I always hate when I’m reminded why I don’t like some technology. Today I was working with Java 5 and specifically a pre-Java 5 xml_rpc API similar to Apache XML-RPC. I made some incorrect assumptions about the return value of a particular rpc call. I was confident that it returned an array of strings (which is translated into a list of strings in Java) - but in fact it returns an array of structs (which is translated into a list of maps).

Eclipse 3.4 M5 is available for download.

See the New & Noteworthy here.

The consistently rude are being consistent again, as yet-another-chain of comments on Javalobby shows how internet criticism flows so freely.

There is a very intriguing ‘part 1’ tutorial about the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) over at Developerworks.

This article was written in part by Chris Aniszczyk, who most people who deal with Eclipse will recognize as a very strong force in the Eclipse community.

I follow most of the Eclipse development mailing-lists because they are low-traffic, and typically only carry conversations relevant to the development side, as opposed to the storm of questions and puzzlers that hit the newsgroups. Periodically you will receive a “Hey, how can I do this?” followed briefly by a “Please ask further questions on the newsgroup”.

As much as I hate to draw further attention to it, I love the soap-opera progressing between Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Alex Blewitt with these two posts: (Eclipse is Not Free and Oh no, it’s Bjorn Again).

Eclipse 3.4 Milestone 2 was released a day late on Saturday, with all of the piratey fan-fare you would expect from the Eclipse team:

Ahoy, me hearties! Eclipse 3.4 milestone 2 (M2) is a’ailable for download from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php. This drop is bein’ propagated t’ the ‘arious Eclipse mirror sites, which usually takes a day or so.

For people who already downloaded the integration build with timestamp 200709210919, thar’s no need t’ download M2 - tis’ the same. Aye, me parrot concurs.