Eclipse DemoCamp Vancouver

I had a great time at Eclipse DemoCamp last night. I was really impressed by two presentations in particular, both of them about testing tools.

One tool, called Tripoli is a differential code coverage tool. Tripoli shows you the difference in coverage between two execution runs of a program. It looked like a great tool to have for finding code relevant to a specific behaviour or event. Kaitlin Sherwood both created Tripoli and presented at DemoCamp.

The other tool presentation was about an Omniscient Debugger. Going into the DemoCamp, I was thinking "Omniscient, yeah right!". In reality, the debugger can show you exactly what happened on a timeline. You can go back in time and see when variables were assigned specific values. Yes, after it has already happened!! This is the first real time machine that I've seen actually working. The tool is called TOD and was presented by its creator Guillaume Pothier, who is a PHD student at the University of Chile.

Mik Kersten did a presentation about Tasktop and Mylyn. Being an avid Mylyn user, I can see how Tasktop adds a lot of value beyond the basics of Mylyn. As an early beta user of Tasktop ages ago, I'm impressed by how far they've come. At the time I was disappointed by their lack of support for the Mac. Though the Mac is still not officially supported by Tasktop, I've heard that it is much improved. Maybe it's time for another test drive.

My presentation on WikiText went well. If you're interested in the slides, here they are.

All in all, a great night. We ended up at the Lenox pub where I got to talk to more great people. I came home wishing that I'd had the opportunity to talk to more people. It's great to see such a lively Eclipse community in Vancouver.

Mylyn Converts Wiki-Based User Guide To Eclipse Help

The Mylyn user guide is maintained online in the Eclipse wiki. While this has the many benefits of using a collaborative wiki for help content, this has meant that the Mylyn user guide is only available online on the wiki, not from within the Eclipse help system. Until now. Using WikiText Ant tasks Mylyn is able to convert the online wiki content into Eclipse help using an automated process. Users of Mylyn now have access to the user guide by using the standard Eclipse help system, including search, table of contents, etc. even when offline.

Going forward this means that the Mylyn project will be able to continue maintaining the user guide in the Eclipse wiki while also providing the same content from within the Eclipse. Furthermore, other Eclipse projects will be able to do the same by adopting the same approach.

Users wishing to see the user guide in Eclipse can do so by installing the Mylyn weekly build as described here. Eclipse committers that would like to have their wiki-based content available within Eclipse can do so by looking at the Mylyn project (org.eclipse.mylyn.help.ui/build-helper.xml) and by making use of the WikiText stand-alone package.

Mylyn WikiText Stand-Alone Package Available

I'm pleased to announce that the Mylyn WikiText stand-alone package is available for download. The download contains jar files and documentation for including WikiText Ant tasks in your build or for using WikiText APIs outside of an Eclipse runtime.

The WikiText project is still in the incubation phase, thus users should be aware that the download has not yet completed a release review. The availability of WikiText stand-alone download enables users to try out WikiText prior to its release, including the much-anticipated wiki-to-DITA functionality.

This is the first time that WikiText stand-alone jars have been made available since the move of Textile-J to the WikiText project. WikiText includes many improvements and fixes since the Textile-J 2.2 release.

Many thanks to Mik Kersten, Steffen Pingel and others at Tasktop who have facilitated the WikiText project.

Mylyn WikiText targets OASIS DITA

Wiki content has become increasingly popular within the DITA community, as evidenced by the recent announcement of the DITA2Wiki open source project. While most of these projects enable DITA-to-wiki conversions, community interest has been expressed for full-cycle wiki-DITA-wiki transformation capability. Mylyn WikiText hopes to close this loop with the addition of its support for DITA output. Mylyn WikiText can now create OASIS DITA as output from wiki markup.

Mylyn WikiText provides a flexible architecture supporting multiple wiki markup languages. This provides organizations with many options when considering a DITA toolchain, whether it be a one-time conversion of existing wiki assets to DITA, or as an integrated part of a publishing process. Currently supported are MediaWiki, Textile, Confluence, TWiki and TracWiki.

I am also very excited about the recent DITA Open Platform project, which aims to enable Eclipse as a full-fledged DITA authoring and publishing platform. With the capabilities provided by Mylyn WikiText and DITA-op, Eclipse as a platform becomes a compelling cross-platform DITA authoring toolset.

Mylyn WikiText originated from Textile-J, where parsing capabilities evolved to support more than 5 wiki markup languages, conversion of wikitext to DocBook, integrated support for the Ant build system and first-class integration with the Eclipse platform.

Mylyn WikiText is looking for community feedback on wikitext to DITA conversion. Please feel free to contact me directly via email or post a bug or enhancement request to the WikiText component of the Mylyn project.