I’ve been looking for a good text editor for the Mac for a few weeks now, since I just can’t seem to get the hang of BBEdit, and $180 seems a bit steep for a text editor (or maybe I’m just a tightwad). Just released though is TextMate, which seems to fit the bill so far, and is reasonably customisable. One of the neat features is the ability to group files together into projects, which I expect to be a big time saver. Another win is the fact that it’s easy to set up custom syntax highlighting and add additional commands to the editor. After a couple of hours of use I had a custom syntax mode for C# defined, and commands to compile and run the current file using Mono. I’ll post them here once they’re a bit more polished.

In Eclipse your plug-ins normally have their classpath’s based upon their dependencies. I’m playing around with an RCP based application that will need to reference external libraries to avoid onerous licensing requirements. Here’s the somewhat convoluted code required to do this:

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Context getContext() {
    if (context != null) { return context; }
    final Properties props = new Properties();
    props.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, getInitialContextFactory());
    props.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, getProviderURL());
    props.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, getDirectoryPrincipal());
    props.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, getDirectoryCredentials());
    URL[] classpath = null;
    Plugin plugin = JmsPlugin.getPlugin();
    try {
        String stringList = plugin.getPluginPreferences().getString(PreferencesInitializer.CLASS_PATH);
        StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(stringList, File.pathSeparator);
        ArrayList v = new ArrayList();
        while (st.hasMoreElements()) {
            v.add(new URL("file://" + st.nextElement()));
        }
        classpath = (URL[]) v.toArray(new URL[v.size()]);
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
        String msg = e.getMessage();
        Debug.error(plugin, 0, msg != null ? msg : "", e);
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
    ClassLoader oldClassLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
    ClassLoader newClassLoader = new URLClassLoader(classpath, getClass().getClassLoader());
    try {
        Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(newClassLoader);
        context = new InitialDirContext(props);
    } catch (NamingException e) {
        String msg = e.getMessage();
        Debug.error(plugin, 0, msg != null ? msg : "", e);
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    } finally {
        Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(oldClassLoader);
    }
    return context;
}

The relevant code is in the first try... catch block. Then I can have this plug-in rely on a second plug in which includes the JMS interfaces only, and have a preference page which allows the user to select a third party JMS provider by URL. At the moment it won’t handle JMS providers that reply on native methods, but that could be fixed the same way if needed. The Debug.error(...) is just a utility class to log an Eclipse IStatus.ERROR message. As an added benefit of this approach, because I use the latest API version in my JMS plugin, I can check for a JMS version at runtime using the metadata returned by Connection.getMetaData() and then only call JMS 1.1 supplied methods when they are available.

After playing around with Lisp for a few days I’ve diverted myself back to a small Java project. Almost immediately I’m missing the Lisp environment! To be sure there are some things that I prefer about my Java environment, which is Eclipse, but I just miss having an interactive top-level so much! It’s just amazingly convenient to be able to try sunning a fragment of code, and the ability to tweak it and try again if you hit any problems is such a productvity boost.

Cleaned up some stupid markup errors that were preventing the main and (so far empty) articles pages from validating as strict XHTML, I’ve also added validator tags to the bottom of the pages.

I’ve finally got around to uploading the first gallery, from when I went to Spain a couple of weeks ago. I should get araound to putting another couple of galleries on line in the next week or so.