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Re: Excited about Eclipse Forms in 3.3M5 - Porting EditorPart to FormEditor [message #466768]

Tue, 24 April 2007 15:20

Craig Pugsley

Messages: 5
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Thanks for the reply (sorry for not getting back to you sooner!).

I've found this more and more coding for RCP. Things go wrong, and you're told something has gone wrong, but you're not told why. The majority of the times I've had workbench-style error messages, I couldn't get a sensible error message from anywhere. I typically go back and undo changes I made since the last time it worked properly, in an attempt to isolate what made it break. If there's a problem with the plug-in definition itself, or something like the classpath, I've found it takes hours to track down what is causing the problem.

This is probably one of my biggest (and only) gripes with RCP / Eclipse over coding in conventional Swing. At least with Swing, if an exception occurred, there were no layers that could hide the exception!

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Re: Excited about Eclipse Forms in 3.3M5 - Porting EditorPart to FormEditor [message #466772 is a reply to message #466768]

Tue, 24 April 2007 17:59

Alex Blewitt

Messages: 946
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

The Swing event thread was always good for gobbling up exceptions and log messages.

But yes, I agree that when something works, it works well. But when it doesn't work, you haven't got a clue.

All I can say is that the more you stray off the 'working path', the less likely it is to find good error messages. The reason why this isn't really fixed is that most of the PDE/JDT people don't make mistakes, so never find out what doesn't work well :-)

It's also the case with highly distributed/modular systems (especially those that use callbacks a lot) that if you supply the wrong callback (or use the wrong extension point ...) then you never get called, and you don't really know why. This is a problem not specific to Eclipse, but to any larger complex system ...

The good news is that experience gives you a clue as to what the right path is, and so staying nearer to it avoids these problems eventually. But it takes time to build experience up.

Alex.

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