Sigasi Eclipse Blog

Xtext resource caching: loading resources 5 times faster

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana). I've always felt ambivalent about that quote. History never ever repeats itself exactly. In computer science on the other hand, it applies very well. In all our collective software applications, we recalculate the same results time and time again and are therefore faced with constant question to remember or not to remember. In this blog series, I'm going to talk about a cache for Xtext resources that we've developed over the past year.

Installing translations for Eclipse

Even though Sigasi 2.x does not have internationalisation (it is not translated to any languages other than English), much of Eclipse is in fact translated. If your native language is not English, you might consider installing the Babel language packs

Just select Help > Install new Software, then enter the correct update location for your Eclipse distribution.

How to set the update description of RCP product updates

Thanks to Ian Bull on Eclipse Con Europe last week, I finally found out how to set the update description for an RCP product update. This was a tiny annoyance that has been itching since the first release of Sigasi. For the Eclipse plugin version of Sigasi, this never was a problem. The feature description is shown in the update dialog.

Build Eclipse documentation from wikitext with Maven Tycho

For Sigasi 2.0 we decided to write all documentation in the textile wiki markup language. With the Mylyn Wikitext plugin, textile files can be converted in lots of different output formats such as Eclipse help, html, pdf,…

Based on the blog posts of Peter Friese I could easily automate the documentation build with Ant.

A view on the complexity of your Xtext ecore model

By default Xtext generates its own ecore model from your grammar. The rules governing this process are not extremely complex but still can interact in surprising ways.