Mik Kersten on Rich Editing for Tasks via Mylyn WikiText

Mik Kersten has writen a great article about WikiText and what it means for Mylyn users, titled Rich Editing for Tasks via Mylyn WikiText. He really does a great job of capturing the essence behind Eclipse's powerful source editing features and how it was applied to the markup editing features of WikiText.

Textile-J Is Moving to Mylyn WikiText!

The Textile-J project announced today that it is moving to Eclipse as the Mylyn WikiText component. Textile-J, now WikiText, is a library for parsing and displaying lightweight markup languages (wikitext). With the addition of WikiText, Mylyn and Tasktop will be able to display markup as it is intended and provide a markup-aware authoring environment.

The move was primarily motivated by my desire to see Mylyn provide first-class support for lightweight markup languages in its task editor. Even though most issue-tracking systems provide support for markup (for example Trac and JIRA), WikiText can also benefit those who use issue-tracking systems with no markup support. For example, using Bugzilla with WikiText will enable users to use markup in their descriptions and comments.

Overall I'm very excited about the move to Mylyn WikiText, as it will not only improve Mylyn and Tasktop but will also benefit existing Textile-J users by ensuring a higher quality library. In designing the move I built some protection for existing Textile-J users into the WikiText project charter so that existing users will be able to continue using WikiText independently of an Eclipse runtime. This is important for users that have integrated Textile-J into their non-Eclipse projects and for those who use the Textile-J Ant tasks.

This project move has been many months in the making, and with the backing and help of the Mylyn team has finally come to fruition. Many thanks go to the team, especially Seffen Pingel, Mik Kersten and Jingwen 'Owen' Ou for their help in making this a reality.

WikiText is available immediately for download from the Mylyn incubation weekly update site. To find out more about WikiText, see the original announcement and the WikiText project homepage.

Eclipse Ganymede on SoyLatte (Mac+Java6+Eclipse)

Mac has no Java 6. The Java 6 beta that Apple released is only 64-bit, which is no good for running Eclipse. Not only is this a major annoyance, it is a problem for developers that need to profile and take heap dumps of their applications.

Some time ago I found this post by Landon Fuller which supposedly launches Eclipse on SoyLatte. While I believe that Landon is a genius, it did not work for me. Well lately I've needed to take some heap dumps, so I tried again.

Here's what worked for me:


/Users/dgreen/Documents/java/soylatte16-i386-1.0.2/bin/java -server -Xms128m -Xmx1536m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -Djava.library.path=/Users/dgreen/bin/jnilib -cp /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.100.v20080509-1800.jar org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main -os macosx -ws carbon -arch x86 -showsplash -launcher /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse -name Eclipse --launcher.library /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS//../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800/eclipse_1114.so -startup /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.100.v20080509-1800.jar -data /Users/dgreen/Documents/workspace -launcher /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse -keyring /Users/dgreen/.eclipse_keyring -consoleLog -showlocation -vm /Users/dgreen/Documents/java/soylatte16-i386-1.0.2


I also had to extract all *.jnilib files from eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.carbon.macosx_3.4*.jar and copy them into /Users/dgreen/bin/jnilib

Finally, Eclipse running in a Java 6 VM on a Mac! Apple, time to get your Java act in gear.

Update 2008-08-21: SoyLatte 1.0.2 works for me, but 1.0.3 and OpenJDK 7 darwin packages posted here don't. If you find a solution, please let me know!

Update 2009-05-11: See this related article Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) on Java 7