DTP News and Views

Final DTP Survey Results October 2010

2010-10-28T16:02:00.011-06:00

We had eight people total complete the survey (a big thank you to all of you), which was more than I was expecting honestly. With as quiet as things have been in DTP lately, I was expecting the sound of crickets to be prevalent. :)

However... As promised, here are the final survey results...

Question 1: Where do you use DTP?

a) Standalone in Eclipse for the database functionality (green)

b) Within WTP or Dali (JPA) (red)

c) Within a commercial product from IBM, Oracle, Sybase, or other company (yellow)

d) Other (please specify) (blue)

As I said in my last post, this was a bit surprising to me. I had no idea that this many folks actually used DTP for its standalone database functionality rather than as part of a larger suite.

The responses to "Other" included:

As part of our tool. For reading database meta data and for parsing SQL (planned).
BIRT

I'm not sure how I forgot BIRT - it wasn't deliberate. But it's nice to confirm that DTP is in fact being used in a few different contexts.

2. How do you use DTP?

a. As a user

b. As a developer

Definitely more use of the DTP toolset for developers than users, but it's nice to see users represented in there as well.

Question 3: Where would you like to see DTP used?

This was an open-ended question and we ended up with three replies:

As a replacement for SQuirreL SQL inside Eclipse.
As more integrated with the IDE
Or as a standalone RCP SQL Tool like PL/SQL Developer

Question 4: What functionality would you like to see in DTP? Or what changes would you like to see?

This was another open-ended question with more responses:

Provide documentation about what is supported for each database... e.g. "how do I see an SQL query explain for Sybase ASE or DB2 UDB"?. After hours of experimenting I *think* its not possible but can't tell for sure.
Offer the ability to specify an order when executing a batch of sql files
ETL functionality - data extract and load
Easier handling - see PL/SQL Developer! More DB-Status functions
Improve the SQL parser as a standalone library

Each of these will probably find their way into Bugzilla as feature requests. And though not all will likely get done, it's good fodder for discussions going forward.

Question 5. Would you like to help with DTP?

There were only three responses - yes, no, and other. The other described itself as "willing to report bugs and test cases", which is great. "No" isn't helpful, but is understood due to a lack of time or resources. And "Yes" is what we always like to hear!

All in all, I'm pleased with the results. We received some constructive feedback in addition to simply discovering that our community still has a heartbeat. :)

As I said last time... If *YOU* have more suggestions for us, feel free to join the mailing list (dtp-dev@eclipse.org) or put a message on the forum/newsgroup and let us know what you're thinking. As always, we're looking for help - whether it's testing and reporting bugs, contributing patches, or becoming a committer!

Thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey. It helps to know what you are thinking!

Have a great Halloween and a wonderful weekend!

Early Survey Results...

2010-10-12T09:20:00.006-06:00

Well, I'm happy to report that not only are there people willing to respond to my survey, but they're willing to respond to a survey about DTP! So it's good to know that there are a few people out there who are still alive and kicking in the community. :)

After a week, we've had 7 responders. No, it's not a huge number, but it's honestly better than I was expecting. And we've had some interesting responses...

The answers to the first question about where our users actually use DTP was shocking to me. I had no idea that this many folks actually used DTP for its standalone database functionality rather than as part of a larger suite.

For the second question, overwhelmingly nearly everybody who uses DTP seems to use it more as a developer than as a user.

Some of the responses as to where folks would like to see DTP get used were also interesting:

As a replacement for SQuirreL SQL inside Eclipse.
As more integrated with the IDE
Or as a standalone RCP SQL Tool like PL/SQL Developer

We used to hear a lot about the SQuirreL SQL
angle in the beginning of DTP, but I hadn't heard that mentioned for a while. Sounds like the PL/SQL Developer is a similar request for functionality, but perhaps as a RCP application. We actually started a bit of this effort in the last release that's available in CVS (look in the Enablement project for the org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.rcp plug-in - it's rough, but it's a start).

And then we had some very thought provoking requests for new functionality...

Provide documentation about what is supported for each database... e.g. "how do I see an SQL query explain for Sybase ASE or DB2 UDB"?. After hours of experimenting I *think* its not possible but can't tell for sure.
Offer the ability to specify an order when executing a batch of sql files
ETL functionality - data extract and load
Easier handling - see PL/SQL Developer! More DB-Status functions
Improve the SQL parser as a standalone library

I'm not quite sure what we'd do for #1 or #4, the rest are pretty self-explanatory. Though we'd love to have any/all of these entered as feature requests in Bugzilla, it's great feedback. We *LOVE* feedback.

Do *YOU* have more suggestions for us? Well, if you haven't already filled out the survey, go ahead and fill it out now (click here for the survey). If you've already filled out the survey, feel free to join the mailing list (dtp-dev@eclipse.org) or put a message on the forum/newsgroup and let us know what you're thinking.

And as always, we're looking for help - whether it's testing and reporting bugs, contributing patches, or becoming a committer!

Thanks to everyone who's filled out the survey so far and thanks in advance to anyone else who does the same!

Where is DTP being used these days?

2010-10-07T13:53:00.004-06:00

As we start looking at what will go into DTP (Data Tools Platform) 1.9 for the Eclipse Indigo (June 2011) release, it struck me that we don't know that much about how DTP is being used currently. It's been a while since we "polled the studio audience" to see what was up...

And though we have a skeleton crew now helping us with bug fixes and new features, we'd love to have more folks pitch in to help - whether it's by writing articles or blog posts, reporting bugs, or offering to lend a hand with patches for existing issues or new functionality. However the help is offered, we'll probably consider it!

But we'd love it if you use DTP if you could take some time and please answer a few survey questions:

Click here to take survey

Your answers will help us figure out where our priorities lie for this next release and what we may or may not have help with from the community!

Thanks in advance and I'll write up another blog post with the results a month from now to share those details.

Hope you're having a great week!

--Fitz

(Image from Discovery Education Resources)

DTP at JBoss

2010-09-08T09:16:00.004-06:00

Dang there's some serious dust on this blog...

But I saw a demo this morning for some new functionality coming to JBoss Tools by the end of the year that uses DTP connection profiles and several views!

Teiid Designer provides tooling for the Teiid s erver, which has all kinds of cool functionality. As they say in the Teiid site - "Teiid is comprised of tools, components and services for creating and executing bi-directional data services. Through abstraction and federation, data is accessed and integrated in real-time across distributed data sources without copying or otherwise moving data from its system of record."

In the demo I saw this morning, I saw two disparate data sources - one Oracle, one SQL Server I think - that were then abstracted via a virtual database that could then access both. So this is sort of like ODA in BIRT, which combines data from different sources to create a particular report. But unlike BIRT which is largely a one way funnel of information to the report engine from what I understand, Teiid provides bi-directional support so you can use this abstraction to go back and forth between data sources.

Long story short, I am encouraged by the fact that - without much help from those of us left in DTP - the Teiid tooling guys managed to adopt the connection profile frameworks and reuse a good amount of tooling for their own stuff which had been on their own proprietary technology.

So a big congratulations to the Teiid guys for their work integrating DTP into their tools. :) As soon as our new milestone release of JBT goes live, I'll provide a link to their "New and Noteworthy" page so you can see some screen shots and more about what this cool tool does.

Hopefully we can see more of this kind of integration with DTP and Eclipse and possibly gain some more folks to help keep DTP alive for the future!

I'll try not to let my next post be another 5 months from now... Geez.

UI Design Thoughts...

2010-04-01T09:01:00.002-06:00

Hi all...

After the "Future of Open Source" panel at EclipseCon 2010, I've been pondering one of the comments about how open source doesn't do "pretty" well. And I have to admit. We have some issues there. Hopefully e4 will ride in on a white horse and save the day, but like all real white horses I wonder what the downside will be (like the poor squire forced to be on "poop" patrol). We shall see... :)

Anyway, was thinking about this today and today's Dilbert made me laugh my butt off... Imagine if it wasn't a web page, but an Eclipse application... and this is how I feel all too often about my OWN stuff. ;)

--Fitz

More EclipseCon 2010 Thoughts

2010-03-31T13:36:00.003-06:00

Hi all...

I try to write up a summary each year I go to EclipseCon documenting what talks I went to, what I thought was interesting, etc.

I've done that here this year on a JBoss Wiki page: https://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-15091

Ignore it if you don't find it useful, but I thought it was a great conference this year. :)

--Fitz

EclipseCon 2010 - Some thoughts

2010-03-31T08:32:00.005-06:00

Hi all...

Yes, it's been a long while (again) since I had an opportunity to write here. But after such a great EclipseCon 2010 experience, I feel it would be a disservice to not talk about it. :)

After joining Red Hat in the middle of 2009, I entered the maelstrom of tooling development in the exciting, chaotic world of Red Hat and JBoss. Leaving Sybase was tough, but it was time to do something different after nearly 13 years at New Era and Sybase. But it was a shock to the system to go from the slow and steady of Sybase to the full speed ahead of Red Hat.

That said, I've had little time to spend on DTP at Eclipse. I feel bad about this. But I'm trying to help as much as I can, just like Brian and Hemant from IBM and Linda from Actuate. None of us can spend as much time as we might like on this great project.

So I went to EclipseCon 2010 with a bit of trepidation. How would DTP be received? We really don't have much to show in our Helios release beyond a few fixes here and there.

We had one talk for DTP this year - DTP in the Real World. I spoke about our improved RCP support in DTP and provided a plea for more community involvement. And Ruth Soliani, from the Eldorado Research Institute in Brazil, who spoke about how they used DTP in their MotoDev Development Studio product (with Motorola) to connect to a SQLite database on an Android device. Pretty darn cool stuff there and they were very kind to say nice things about the DTP team. :)

On the first night of the conference, we had a DTP Birds of a Feather (BoF) that was very encouraging. We met Ray and Chris from Ingres who will be helping us out from that side of the DBMS world where they can. We met Shenxue Zhou from Oracle, who we've been trying to help out as we can as well.

So the show of community support was awesome. At EclipseCon 2009, we had a very low attendance to DTP talks and nobody attended the BoF. This year we had 30-40 people attend the DTP talk and 3 people (beyond the DTP PMC) show up, plus one guy who was hoping DTP meant "Desktop Publishing" (Sorry about that!). We had great conversations with Ruth's team, the guys from Ingres, and Shengxoe from Oracle.

Now I'm actually hopeful DTP will survive. And that's a good thing!

A big thanks go to Oisin Hurley and Don Smith who put on a terrific conference this year. Every talk I went to had a good number of people attending and a few were standing room only (like Mik Kiersten's talk about Mylyn!). Not to mention the awesome keynotes and the giant moon robots that looked like something out of The Matrix. :)

Thanks to everyone who attended and especially the DTP community who's coming back to life!

--Fitz

Looking for DTP Hitchhikers...

2009-10-20T11:23:00.004-06:00

Hi everyone...

Wow... It's been a while since I last wrote on this blog. I've been keeping busy at Red Hat since I hopped the fence back in June. :)

Unfortunately, with Sybase's reduction in DTP resources and a few other folks we've lost by attrition, we're suffering from a serious lack of help in the Connectivity and Enablement projects at the moment. Though Linda from Actuate helps out in Connectivity every now and then, it's pretty much just yours truly with occasional help from our friends at Codehoop. And my time these days is pretty minimal for DTP.

Talking with Brian Payton, our fearless leader these days in DTP, it came up that with the small core of folks involved it was like we were in a book "Hitchhiking Through Europe on Pennies a Day" - not getting too far, but when you do get picked up and make some progress on your journey it's often for a brief burst of speed and then you're out of the car on foot again.

So we're looking for a few hitchhikers to help us out.

I come to you, our friends in the DTP community and the broader Eclipse community, and ask for help. We're not asking for full time, devoted folks. We're asking that if you get some time and want to dig into DTP, we have lots of Bugzilla entries that could use some tender loving care.

If everyone who uses DTP would dig into one DTP bug every few months and provide a patch, I'm pretty sure our list of issues would decrease dramatically.

We already have a few mediums out there to communicate... We have the Eclipse DTP mailing lists and newsgroup (check out http://wiki.eclipse.org/DTP_New_Committer_Info to get the list of how to find those resources). And I just created a new IRC chat (#eclipse-dtp) on freenode that I'll be on any time I happen to be logged in. Maybe we can get the conversation going between other DTP community members and bring things back to life a bit!

Personally, I've been involved with DTP since 2006 and have really enjoyed working with everyone I've met. Who knows who you might meet? We can't offer fame or fortune for your contributions, but we can definitely offer our gratitude and most likely the gratitude of a grateful DTP community.

Who's interested in helping us out?

--Fitz

Greetings from the land of Red Hats!

2009-08-27T12:52:00.003-06:00

Hi all...

It's been a while since I last posted anything on this blog, but I want to assure you it's not dead. Well, not quite anyway. My new position at Red Hat has been and will continue to be a challenge - a good one! But that means I have less time to spend on DTP topics...

I know I still owe (oh ye few who read these words) the remainder of the YouTube/DTP plug-in I promised way back in March with my EclipseCon 2009 talk. But I hope to get back to that sooner than later.

In the meantime, I wanted to congratulate Brian Payton from IBM for becoming the new DTP lead. He's a great guy who's kept a handle on the SQL Editor for quite a while now and I'm sure he'll do great for the rest of DTP too! I'll continue to help out where I can and be involved, but to a much smaller extent.

As such, if you see him around please welcome Brian P to his new position if you get a chance. I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from our community!

We're in the process of finishing up 1.7.1 for the end of September with the Galileo SR1 release train and will then see what we can do for Helios.

If you, our great community, have some extra cycles to help out, we'd love to have you join the party. Give us a holler on the mailing lists or newsgroups and let us know what you're thinking. The more the merrier!

Thanks a ton for your continued support of DTP and hopefully I'll get back on track with some new posts here before long. :)

--Fitz

The end of an era and a new beginning...

2009-06-16T08:17:00.002-06:00

To the Eclipse and DTP communities...

Some of you may have already known that I was leaving the leadership of DTP at the end of Galileo. If you didn't already know, Sybase is pulling away from project leadership for now. They have their reasons for doing so, and though valid I am sad to see us retreat from DTP after the last four years.

That said, it's been an honor to help lead the DTP project over the last year and I'm proud to have been involved with all the participants and the community for the last four years. I've learned a ton and met some truly amazing people. And most of all, I've had fun. Those are always my three criteria for success -- the people I work with, what I learn on the job, and whether the job itself has some elements of fun. It's not always fun, but it has to have a bit at least. :)

I'll miss being as involved as I have been, but still hope to retain my committer status as I shift jobs, leave Sybase, and head to Red Hat at the end of the month. After more than 13 years at New Era and Sybase, I'm leaving to pursue a different opportunity. Definitely time for a change and RH made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

So I'll still be around DTP, just not as much as I have been over the last few years. I'm sure that others will pick up the mantle of DTP leadership and continue to shepherd the project forward. We have a great community that continues to grow and use our code in innovative ways, so I'm hopeful about the future of the project. I will still try and continue to post here as time allows, but I can't guarantee anything.

Thank you to all of you who have helped over the years. I'll still be around and hope to keep in touch!

--Fitz (aka Brian Fitzpatrick)

Interesting trend in DTP Mailing List

2009-04-23T09:10:00.003-06:00

Hey all...

I saw Dave Carver's post about using MarkMail's indices of the Eclipse mailing lists and was inspired to take a look at the DTP mailing list to see if there were any trends. We seem to follow the same trend as WTP...

We seem to peak around the time of each year's release train, which makes sense, and then drop off a bit after that.

This helps to understand a bit of the adoption curve as was noted in the EclipseCon 2009 keynote "The Social Mind: Designing Like Groups Matter" (you can see the abstract here).

They showed a picture of Wikipedia contributions that looks somewhat similar to the graphs for WTP in Dave's post and this one for the DTP list. Initially there's a lot of contributions and conversation and it starts to drop off over time with only a few people doing the majority of the posting. In our case, the top 5 are all either Sybase or IBM folks, but it's heartening to see that at #6, we have Oracle represented and some of our friends at Actuate as well.

What does this tell us? Honestly not much more than we already knew, but it's good to have another metric. Thanks Dave for pointing out that Markmail is there!

If anyone's interested in the DTP-DEV stats, feel free to check them out here as well.

Back to the grindstone!

--Fitz

DTPtv - Part 1 - Using YouTube APIs in Eclipse

2009-04-15T09:25:00.009-06:00

Hey there...

So yes, I'm back to talking about DTPtv... (You can see my introduction to the series here.)

Image via Wikipedia

Now that we know generally what we want to do, we'll start by focusing on making the YouTube APIs usable in Eclipse and perform a simple test. Easy enough, right?

So the first thing I had to do was grab the YouTube jars from Google. I found those here. I grabbed the latest version of gdata-samples.java. The YouTube/Google APIs also have some dependencies, so I had to go out and grab imap.jar, mailapi.jar, pop3,jar, and smtp.jar. I was able to re-use a plug-in wrapper for javax.activation.jar from Orbit, which I'll talk about in a sec.

With all of the jars downloaded, I just had to create an Eclipse plug-in wrapper so they were available to other plug-ins. To do this is cake... Right-click in the Package Explorer, select New->Project, and in the list of Wizards select "Plug-in from existing JAR archives". Select your external jars (it will copy them into the plug-in wrapper). I named mine "com.google.gdata.youtube" and unchecked the "Unzip the JAR archives into the project" so it kept the jars as jars, not source code. Click Finish and watch the magic happen.

When it's done, I had to do one last thing to add a dependency. The Google APIs still depend on the javax.activation.jar...

Do you remember I mentioned the Orbit project? Well, you can read more about it here, but the idea is that it provides a repository for a number of third-party projects/resources that are shared across Eclipse. These have already gone through the IP process and are approved for our use. (Note however that even if a library is approved by the Foundation for use by all projects, project teams must still fill out a Contribution Questionnaire and notify the Foundation of their intentions to use a library). And there are quite a few of them. If you look at the latest build (from back in August 2008), you'll see 83 different packages available.

In this case, I just want javax.activation, so I locate it in the list, download it, and drop it in my Eclipse environment. Once the workbench picks it up, I can add it as a dependency in the MANIFEST.MF file for my wrapper plug-in.

Cool. So that pretty much wraps up my jar wrapper plug-in. Not too tough there.

So now what? Now that we have this plug-in, we can write a quick little application to do something with it.

I've gone ahead and created a simple class that does a very basic YouTube search...

package org.eclipse.datatools.sample.utube.sandbox;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.URL;

import com.google.gdata.client.youtube.YouTubeQuery;
import com.google.gdata.client.youtube.YouTubeService;
import com.google.gdata.data.youtube.VideoFeed;
import com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException;

public class UTubeUtils {

public static String TR_FEED_URL = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated";//$NON-NLS-1$

/**
* Return a list of video entries back to the calling method
*/
public static VideoFeed getResults(String author, String title) throws IOException, ServiceException
{
  YouTubeService myService = new YouTubeService(
          "", //$NON-NLS-1$
          "");  //$NON-NLS-1$

  String VIDEO_FEED = TR_FEED_URL;
  YouTubeQuery query = new YouTubeQuery(new URL(VIDEO_FEED));

  //set the author
  if( (author != null) && author.length() > 0)
  {
      query.setAuthor(author);
  }
  //set the actual query string
  if((title != null) && title.length() > 0)
  {
      query.setFullTextQuery(title);
  }

  //choose most viewed as the ordering
  query.setOrderBy(YouTubeQuery.OrderBy.VIEW_COUNT);

  //get the video feed
  VideoFeed feed = myService.query(query,VideoFeed.class);
  return feed;
}
}

So all that this really does is get a list of the top rated videos currently at YouTube. Pretty straightforward.

You'll notice a couple of things about the code. You have to have a developer key (your own ID as a developer or one for a particular company) and a client ID (seems you can have many of these). This basically lets the Google & YouTube APIs know that you're legitimately asking for data and aren't some rogue hacker trying to cause trouble. You can get these two items here. Once you have them, you can just create new constants for them and just use the constants.

So if you swap your developer key and client ID into the above code, it should do a quick search. But how should we test it?

I like creating new plug-in projects with example menu actions. To do this is pretty easy... Right-click in the Package Explorer, select New->Project, and in the list of Wizards select "Plug-in Project". Name it and set the plug-in ID and other info, and on the "Templates" page in the wizard, select "Plug-in with a popup menu." By default it keys off an IFile, so you can get to it from the Navigator or Project Navigator in the workbench.

It goes off and creates the basic code and you can then use your new utility class pretty easily by changing the run() method in the action class to look something like this:

    public void run(IAction action) {
   try {
       VideoFeed feed = UTubeUtils.getResults(null, null);
       if (feed != null) {
           if (feed.getEntries() != null && feed.getEntries().size() > 0) {
               System.out.println("Found some videos...");
               Iterator<VideoEntry> iter = feed.getEntries().listIterator();
               while (iter.hasNext()) {
                   VideoEntry entry = iter.next();
                   System.out.println("Video Entry: " + entry.getTitle().getPlainText());
               }
           }
           // clean up
           feed = null;
       }
   } catch (ServiceException se) {
       se.printStackTrace();
   } catch (IOException ie) {
       ie.printStackTrace();
   }
}

When you run the workbench and right-click on your action in the Navigator, you should see something like this in your development workbench console view...

Success! We have a plug-in wrapper for our YouTube jars and their dependencies. And we've verified that we can use those APIs in an Eclipse environment.

Next we have to figure out how to hook up YouTube to DTP and show a video in the workbench. And after that we can fine tune our look and feel to make it easier for our users.

Maybe this was a bit longer to write up than I'd thought originally, but this part of the process only took me about half a day when I was creating this code the first time.

Questions? Comments? Drop me a note here and I'll be happy to get back to you.

Next time I'll write about hooking up YouTube and DTP and how I used the built-in Eclipse web browser UI component to show videos.

--Fitz

DTP APis and How to Use a Transient Connection Profile

2009-04-13T10:45:00.005-06:00

Hi there...

On the DTP newsgroup we had a question about using DTP APIs to create a new transient connection profile and then use that to execute some DDL...

It's pretty easy actually... The trick for the transient profile is knowing all the bits and pieces you have to have ahead of time, like the:

provider ID, which is the connection profile type ID
vendor and version, which relate to the vendor/version of the database you're connecting to
and then the driver path. Note that you can also use a pre-defined driver and get the DriverInstance from the DriverManager, then retrieve various properties like the vendor, version, class name, and driver path from there

So you end up with something like this:

    private static String providerID = "org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.derby.embedded.connectionProfile"; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String vendor = "Derby"; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String version = "10.1"; //$NON-NLS-1$

   private static String jarList = "C:\\Derby10.1.3.1\\db-derby-10.1.3.1-bin\\lib\\derby.jar"; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String dbPath = "c:\\DerbyDatabases\\MyDB"; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String userName = ""; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String password = ""; //$NON-NLS-1$

   private static String driverClass = "org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver"; //$NON-NLS-1$
   private static String driverURL = "jdbc:derby:" + dbPath + ";create=true"; //$NON-NLS-1$ //$NON-NLS-2$

   public static Properties generateTransientDerbyProperties() {
       Properties baseProperties = new Properties();
       baseProperties.setProperty( IDriverMgmtConstants.PROP_DEFN_JARLIST, jarList );
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.DRIVER_CLASS_PROP_ID, driverClass);
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.URL_PROP_ID, driverURL);
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.USERNAME_PROP_ID, userName);
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.PASSWORD_PROP_ID, password);
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.DATABASE_VENDOR_PROP_ID, vendor);
       baseProperties.setProperty(IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.DATABASE_VERSION_PROP_ID, version);
       baseProperties.setProperty( IJDBCConnectionProfileConstants.SAVE_PASSWORD_PROP_ID, String.valueOf( true ) );
       return baseProperties;
   }

   public void createTransientDerbyProfile() throws Exception {
       ProfileManager pm = ProfileManager.getInstance();
      
       IConnectionProfile transientDerby = pm.createTransientProfile(providerID, generateTransientDerbyProperties());
       // do something with the profile
      
   }

And then once you have your transient profile, connect, get the Java connection object, and execute your DDL...

        IStatus status = transientDerby.connect();
       if (status.equals(IStatus.OK)) {
           // success
           java.sql.Connection conn = getJavaConnectionForProfile(transientDerby);
           if (conn != null) {
               try {
                   java.sql.Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
                   java.sql.ResultSet results = stmt.executeQuery("<INSERT QUERY/DDL HERE>");
               } catch (java.sql.SQLException sqle) {
                   sqle.printStackTrace();
               }

           }
          
       } else {
           // failure :(
           if (status.getException() != null) {
               status.getException().printStackTrace();
           }
       }

So not too bad. Great question though! Hope this helps!

--Fitz

I Want My DTPtv...

2009-04-09T14:12:00.006-06:00

Hi again...

So one of my presentations at EclipseCon 2009 was "DTPtv and Other Wacky Ideas."

Was this truly a wacky idea? Probably. Who would have thought to merge Eclipse, YouTube, and DTP in one go?

My goal was two-fold... First, I wanted to show that DTP can be used for something more than just databases. Far too often we're pidgeonholed as a provider of database tools. And though we do that, we do much more as well. Second, I wanted to do something out of the usual box, and YouTube is pretty dang far out of the box...

Basically I focused on three different things...

Make the YouTube APIs accessible and test them.
Create a YouTube Search connection profile in DTP so you could create and manage multiple searches in a variety of ways.
Create a viewer that would allow a user to take advantage of YouTube searches on the fly and see the results within the Eclipse IDE or in an RCP application.

Now why would you want to do this you might ask? Good question.

Image via CrunchBase

Let's say you write Eclipse RCP applications for a company with a healthy education department. They want to help out beginning users by recording tutorials and putting them up on YouTube. Not only will it help your users, but it works as a bit of helpful marketing for your sales staff. And now that they're doing this, they want a way to be able to take advantage of these YouTube videos right inside the application.

Maybe this isn't so far fetched after all?

In the next series of blog posts, I'll focus on the three steps I took to get this all working. I demoed working code at the conference and will clean it up a little, zip it up, and have it available on a file sharing site soon. I hope to also contribute it back to the Examples project at Eclipse, as it crosses project boundaries.

As always, please feel free to ask questions or make comments as I go through the process. Many of you will find this old hat, but I'm hoping someone can take advantage of the information. :)

Thanks!
--Fitz

EclipseCon 2009 Post-mortem

2009-04-02T09:08:00.004-06:00

Hey all!

I'm still in the process of getting my act back together after EclipseCon 2009 last week in Santa Clara, California. Was a great conference as per usual, and a bit of an eye-opener for me at least as far as the excitement (or lack thereof) for DTP in the conference community.

View Larger Map

First, let me say that I am very excited about Amazon's announcement about the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. Eclipse in the Cloud is a very cool concept and one that I think will prove to be fertile ground for all sorts of interesting applications. The exciting part for me was hearing that the AWS Toolkit team is still looking at using DTP to help them integrate with their SimpleDB database in the Cloud in a future release of the toolkit.

Anything we at DTP can do to help with that effort would be very educational and cool for us. And as always, we'll help wherever we can. :)

Second... There were a TON of great talks at EclipseCon this year. Though E4 seemed to get most of the buzz, I think that runtime talks were running a close second. After attending a number of talks in all parts of the spectrum (business, coding, new tools, and so on), I came away with a ton of cool ideas I'd love to explore if time allowed. Things from exposing DTP as OSGi services, to using the Data Binding APIs, to using Zest to possibly help to visualize a database schema and other things. I have a loooong list of things to explore.

And third, I was bummed about the lack of interest in our DTP talks this year. We had a few people show up at the DTP tutorial on Monday, and I had a few people at my DTPtv talk, but we ended up with an empty room for our set of short talks at the end of Thursday.

Now, I know that DTP is really more of a "plumbing" project and I get that plumbing isn't sexy. But when people put time and effort into creating presentations (and in one case fly from Germany to present), it's disappointing that nobody wanted to listen.

Yes, there were probably extenuating circumstances. I know that many people left the conference early to catch flights and there were other talks that were probably much more exciting (I missed John & Max's talk in the same slot and would have liked to attended). But still...

Even with that bummer deal, I still think it was an excellent conference. Scott Rosenbaum and the program committee (of which I was a very very minor part) did a great job recruiting amazing keynotes and cool folks to come talk about their technologies. And as I said, I came away brimming with ideas for DTP.

So maybe next year will be a better year for DTP... Who knows?

I'll be writing up one or two more posts about my EclipseCon experience this year, including a post about my DTPtv talk, which (though it went short), I had a great time doing.

Thanks to everybody involved in the conference this year. Let's do it again next year!

--Fitz

DTP at EclipseCon 2009

2009-03-19T09:09:00.004-06:00

Hey there!

Yes, it's almost that time again... EclipseCon 2009 starts with a bang on Monday. Can you believe it? It's already here!!

I head out to the (hopefully sunny) state of California on Sunday morning early for a boatload of meetings that afternoon and then DTP has a tutorial bright and early Monday morning at 8am.

But I thought I'd fill everyone in on what's cool in the world of DTP at EclipseCon this year...

We have our tutorial obviously -- "Using and Extending Eclipse Data Tools (DTP)" on Monday morning at 8am. If you're planning on attending, please check out the list of pre-requisites. We'll start with the DTP tooling, talk about DTP APIs, and then go a bit into how to extend the ODA and SQL editor for your own particular uses. Linda Chan (Actuate), Brian Payton (IBM), and myself will be presenting.

We also have a couple of long talks...

"DTPtv and Other Wacky Ideas" (My talk merging DTP and YouTube... yeah, you read that right!)
"Generating intelligent data access widgets" (Our friends at Ingres talking about some cool new functionality built on DTP.)

And a number of short talks that will be collected into one curated session hosted by yours truly...

The curated session with all of these short talks is "Data Tools from Users to Commercial Extenders"
Included in this set of short talks:

"Access your data without Eclipse clutter!" (more from our friends at Ingres)
"Getting started with the DTP SQL Query Builder" (Brian Payton - IBM)
"IBM pureQuery: leveraging the DTP project to integrate Java and SQL development" (Brian Payton - IBM)

So it's not forgotten, we also have a Birds of a Feather session on Monday night. If you want to come and chat, ask questions, and see what's going on in the world of DTP please drop by!

Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Bof

And if you're going to attend the Eclipse Community Spotlight panel at the end of the conference, you'll get to see a bunch of us talking about what's going on in the world of Eclipse.

So be sure to check us out while you're at EclipseCon! I hope to see you there!

--Fitz

Podcast about DTP at EclipseCon 2009

2009-02-17T09:40:00.004-07:00

Hi all!

Image via Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago, Wayne Beaton was kind enough to put up with me for a podcast in his series about EclipseCon 2009. What did we talk about? The Data Tools Platform of course!

We chatted about some of the talks we have for DTP at EclipseCon this year. And we of course hope to see you DTP community members at each of them... ok, maybe just a few (there are so many great presentations, you almost wish you could clone yourself!). But definitely stop by!

Though I still think I sound like Kermit the Frog, the podcast is up there for all to hear at Eclipse Live. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks Wayne!
--Fitz

Cool DTP Talks at EclipseCon 2009

2009-01-19T09:21:00.004-07:00

Hey all!

I'm always amazed by the depth and breadth of talks at EclipseCon and this year is no different. In the Data Tooling category, we have a diverse set of talks (you can see the list here) on everything from some new tooling we've been working on, updates to the Graphical SQL Query Builder, how Ingres is rolling DTP components in new and unique ways, to using YouTube in DTP and how a commercial vendor (IBM) is using and extending DTP APIs for their PureQuery product.

I have to admit I'm sort of partial to the YouTube presentation I'm doing :), but I'm very curious to hear Ingres and IBM talk about their tooling and products and how DTP is playing a role in those.

For those of you just getting started with DTP, we have a tutorial scheduled for the Monday of the conference that's going to walk through a ton of topics from adding a new JDBC driver to the mix, to supporting a new database, and customizing SQL syntax and so on...

DTP is much more than just a great set of tools for data access... It's a great community. And EclipseCon is when that community comes together.

Come join our community!

--Fitz

Data Tools at EclipseCon 2009

2008-12-19T08:44:00.004-07:00

Hey all!

Yes, the holidays are almost upon us... But even better than that, EclipseCon 2009 is just around the corner! (Ok, maybe not RIGHT around the corner, but three months will zip by in no time.)

This year in the Data Tools track we have a tutorial coming up and bunch of cool talks from a number of different directions.

Though I'm helping with the tutorial this year and moderating a block of short talks, I also am talking about how to use DTP to connect to something other than a database. After all, not all data is in databases!

My long talk this year will show how DTP and the Data Source Explorer can be used for searching and viewing YouTube videos in Eclipse. How do these two worlds meet? Come to my talk and find out!

Besides that, I get to moderate a set of three cool short talks. These bright folks will talk about how DTP is being used in RCP as a database developer's type of tool, what's going on with the SQL Query Builder in Galileo, and how DTP is being used in cool ways by a commercial application.

So be sure to check out some of our talks this year! In another post, I'll talk some about what to expect from our tutorial and some of the other cool talks going on at EC2009 that I'm excited about!

Register today and don't forget to reserve a room at the hotel (it fills up fast!)!

Happy Holidays to all!
--Fitz

Out of Memory Errors...

2008-12-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaHi all...

I recently spent about a day and a half chasing my tail trying to track down some bizarre out of memory errors I was running into with Ganymede SR1 when debugging some DTP stuff and thought I'd pass along what I learned. I was continually running out of heap space while debugging, which was very troubling.

At first, I thought I had somehow corrupted my workspace. So I created a new workspace and tried it again (several times actually) and ended up with the same problem.

Next, I thought I'd try the Galileo Platform Galileo M3 build (along with the associated GEF, EMF, and DTP builds) and see if I got the error. At first I didn't, and I thought 3.5 might have fixed the problem... [sigh] No luck.

So then I started poking around on Google, trying to figure out how to bump up my heap space.

I kept running across this suggestion (which after thinking about it was kind a "well duh" kind of thing):

"Add -Xms256M -Xmx512M to the VM arguments for the runtime configuration or on the main Eclipse command line when you start it up..."

Lo and behold it works now in Galileo and Ganymede. Life is good.

But it was a frustrating end to the week, only to discover that I was just oblivious to the simple solution. :(

Hope this saves someone else from the pain and suffering!

--Fitz

New DB Support in DTP for Galileo...

2008-12-15T08:59:00.003-07:00

Image via WikipediaHey All!

Yes, it's been a while. But things are starting to hop with DTP for Galileo.

Our DTP 1.7 release will include some support for new databases and some updated support for existing ones...

Ingres has been kind enough to contribute their plug-ins for Ingres DB support in DTP for Galileo and we finally have them as part of our regular build.
I added some rudimentary SQLite support recently and that's now part of the regular build.
And Ivar and our friends at NexB were kind enough to contribute some big updates to our Microsoft SQL Server support, including new support for SQL Server 2008.

So big thanks to Ingres and NexB for making those contributions possible!

More changes are going in all the time as well... Enhancements and bug fixes mostly, but some new features as well.

Be sure to check out our M4 milestone build here for some early access!

--Fitz

Get your submissions in for EclipseCon 2009!

2008-11-07T13:36:00.002-07:00

Hi all!

Yes, it's just the first week of November... But November 24 is creeping up on us all too quickly... 18 days and will come and go and you'll be wondering where all the time went!

So it's time to think about a presentation for EclipseCon!

Simply want to share some cool tips or news with the world? Do a short talk! You only have to fill 10 minutes and it goes by like lightning.

Do you have more to say? Do a long talk! 50 minutes goes by very quickly.

Do you have too much to say in an hour and want to help people learn some new Eclipse skills? By all means try for a tutorial slot! Two hours of your very own to teach a few old (or new) developers some new tricks!

But don't wait too long! We'd love to see some DTP-themed talks. What cool things are you doing with Data Tools? Use it in new and twisted ways and share it with the rest of us!

Only 18 more days to get your proposals in!

Good luck and hope to see some talks soon!

--Fitz

Perceived Benefits of "Free" Open Source Software

2008-09-22T08:00:00.000-06:00

Hi all...

Perceived benefits of Open Source involvement. I'm betting that nearly everyone in the Open Source community has wrestled with it at some point, either with customers, management, or both. And I have to admit, it was a bit of a shock to the system (in a good way) when I was introduced to the Eclipse community a few years ago. I didn't really have a good understanding of Open Source back then. And I may still not have a good handle on open source, but I'd like to think I know a little more than when I started.

Open Source means different things to different people. Some people just see the word "free" and get all giddy. Others see it as an opportunity to spread the wealth a bit and help out the community. Frameworks are popular in this respect - just look at Eclipse, Apache, and SourceForge. Each has its own piece to the puzzle and companies and developers can take those bits and assemble them in cool and unique ways if they meet their needs.

But ultimately the "free" of Open Source is that it's "free" to use, modify, and redistribute within the scope of the license agreement under which it's distributed. Note that I didn't say it's "free" in what it costs to create or maintain.

Often you'll hear the phrase "free as in beer" not "free as in speech". Or gratis vs. libre. It takes time, money, and all the various ingredients for whatever it is you're putting together - whether that be virtual, like software, or physical, like beer.

Let me expand on that a bit. I like beer, so it's an easy analogy to expand on. :)

When the "beer" flows freely, it acts as more than just a social lubricant (those EclipseCon evening social events we do so enjoy). I think it actually greases the wheels of progress so individuals can get beyond the gears and widgets they may be stuck on and move on to higher levels of complexity. (For example, focusing on the design of the "car" and not the "nuts and bolts" required to put it all together.)

But in order for the "beer" to flow, somebody has to make it. Somebody must grow the hops and barley, secure water rights, acquire a facility to ferment and bottle the results, and so on. It takes effort to combine these ingredients, as well as time and money, into a nectar that can be shared to do all these wonderful things in an open community of ideas.

Each Eclipse project has its own brand of beer. And not everyone will be able to use every kind of beer that's available. Think of it as a brewery introducing a new wheat beer. I'm not a big wheat beer fan, but I can appreciate the care that goes into making it, and many of the processes involved are the same used for other beers, so there's a shared or at least similar set of ingredients that we can help with or at least support in this community of peers.

To continue the "beer" analogy, the Eclipse Foundation is as much a bottling facility and brew pub as it is an actual brewery. Its role is to help distribute the beer around the world, but also to gather communities and raise awareness so the beer doesn't stop flowing due to a lack of participation from those communities. Free beer does nothing for anyone if nobody knows about it and nobody drinks it.

So I see my role as the titular head of DTP (if only because we need a head to chop off should things get out of hand) to do three things at a high level...

Represent Sybase's interests at Eclipse so we can continue making and drinking beer, whether it's a Sybase brand of beer or someone else's.
Invite others to drink our beer so we start seeing more people drinking their way to newer and more exciting things that would then allow us to do bigger and better things as well.
And make sure the beer continues to flow. Ingredients must keep coming to the brewery. New types of beer improve the richness of the overall production of the brewery, and sometimes we need to coordinate to help market and sell the beer to other distributors and markets to make sure the free exchange continues to perpetuate itself.

The grand goal is to continue to make the beer that we need to survive, but also allow open source, DTP, and Eclipse to expand and grow in surprising ways.

I'm constantly amazed at the breadth of products and projects that are beginning to adopt and use DTP for their own purposes. Every year, we add more great people and companies to the mix. So we need to continue to nurture and grow DTP to continue building awareness and adoption of our beer so that the immediate community as well as our customers are aware of our efforts.

So drink up... I'd like to see us making and drinking DTP beer for a long time to come. :)

--Fitz

Creating the SQLite Connection Profile UI bits

2008-08-28T13:53:00.012-06:00

Hi there!

So now we're almost to our first functional version of a SQLite connection profile in DTP. We have a driver-wrapper plug-in, a driver definition, an overridden catalog loader, and a connection profile with its associated connection and connection factory classes. What's next? Why, adding the UI so you can create the profile, of course!

With versions of DTP prior to Ganymede, this was a more difficult, but not horrible task. In Ganymede, we've reduced the amount of work to adding three extension points and writing four key classes in a org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ui plug-in (basically just extending these classes a tad, so little real work involved):

A connection profile wizard extension that uses the org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.connectionProfile extension and uses the newWizard node so we can define our wizard
A property page extension (org.eclipse.ui.propertyPages) to define a property page so we can edit our SQLite conneciton profile instances
A driver UI contributor extension (org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.driverUIContributor) to create a reusable UI component that gathers the information we need for our SQLite connections
A connection profile wizard class that extends the org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleNewConnectionProfileWizard class
A connection profile wizard page that extends org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsWizardPage
A connection profile property page that extends org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsPropertyPage
And a driver UI component that is used on the wizard and property pages that implements org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.IDriverUIContributor

It may look daunting, but really it boils down to a few extension points, a few extended classes, and an instance of poor man's inheritance (copying a class from another project).

So let's get started!

Implementing the Driver UI Contributor Class

We're going to start with something that may seem a little backwards, but will make sense in a few minutes (hopefully). We're going to start with the driver UI component. Why? Because it's used on the property page and the wizard page, and will make our lives easier.

To avoid starting from scratch, I simply took the Derby Embedded driver UI contributor from the Derby UI project (org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.apache.derby.ui is the plug-in project and you're looking for the DerbyEmbeddedDriverUIContributor class in package org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.apache.derby.internal.ui.connection.drivers). You'll also probably want to grab the Messages class and properties files from that package.

After that, I just changed the names to protect the innocent for this first version. I'll go through and do a cleanup pass later. (I'll upload a zip with all of the code so you can play with it yourself.)

All we're doing is creating a basic UI that will gather the necessary information for the JDBC URL. The Derby UI works just fine for SQLite (for now), so why change anything?

Defining the Driver UI Contributor extension

So now that we have our driver UI contributor class, we can let DTP know about it. To do that, we define a "org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.driverUIContributor" extension point and add a new driverUIContributor node beneath it.

You can see that this is pretty straightforward as far as properties go.

id = a unique ID for the driver UI contributor
class = the fully qualified name of our driver UI contributor class
driverTemplateID = the ID for the driver we're defining the UI for

Pretty easy. Next, we'll set up the wizard.

Creating the Wizard

So new let's take a look at the newWizard part of the connectionProfile extension.

As you can see, we have a number of properties we need to fill out.

id = the unique ID for this particular connection profile wizard
name = the text that shows up in the list of connection profiles
class = this is the class that extends org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleNewConnectionProfileWizard (we'll cover it in just a minute)
profile = this is the ID of our connection profile that we created in the last article
icon = this is the image for the wizard. you can copy this icon directly out of any of the other connection profile UI plug-ins from the DTP CVS repository
description = a general description of what the wizard does that is displayed as a tooltip
category = not used

So now that we have our extension, let's work on our wizard and wizard page classes.

As metioned earlier, these are simply going to be extending a couple of classes that already exist in org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.

A connection profile wizard class that extends the org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleNewConnectionProfileWizard class
A connection profile wizard page that extends org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsWizardPage

These classes look pretty darn easy.

Our wizard class looks like this:

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ui.connection;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleNewConnectionProfileWizard;

public class NewSQLITEConnectionProfileWizard extends
ExtensibleNewConnectionProfileWizard {
public NewSQLITEConnectionProfileWizard() {
super(
    new SQLITEProfileDetailsWizardPage(
            "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ui.connection.SQLITEProfileDetailsWizardPage")); //$NON-NLS-1$
}
}

And our wizard page looks like this:

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ui.connection;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsWizardPage;
import org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ISQLITEConnectionProfileConstants;

public class SQLITEProfileDetailsWizardPage extends
ExtensibleProfileDetailsWizardPage {

public SQLITEProfileDetailsWizardPage(String pageName) {
super(pageName, ISQLITEConnectionProfileConstants.SQLITE_CATEGORY_ID);
}
}

You'll notice the reference to ISQLITEConnectionProfileConstants.SQLITE_CATEGORY_ID. That's just a way to point to the category of driver templates we're interested in for this connection profile. In our case, it looks like this:

public static final String SQLITE_CATEGORY_ID = "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.driver.category"; //$NON-NLS-1$

So now all we have left to do is define our property page.

Defining a SQLite property page

There's no special mojo for defining a property page for a connection profile. It works the same as it does elsewhere in Eclipse. You define a property page extension (org.eclipse.ui.propertyPages) and provide it a property page class.

Once that is done, we can work on the filter to indicate what type of object this is a property page for.

The filter is on the org.eclipse.datatools.profile.property.id property and we set that to org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connectionProfile, which is the ID for our SQLite connection profile type.

And lastly, we specify when we want our property page to be enabled. And as seen in the last few screens, we merely want our page to be enabled when we're on a connection profile object.

The property page class itself is as simple as the wizard page was earlier. The class extends org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsPropertyPage.

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ui.connection;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.ui.wizards.ExtensibleProfileDetailsPropertyPage;
import org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.ISQLITEConnectionProfileConstants;

public class SQLITEProfilePropertyPage extends
ExtensibleProfileDetailsPropertyPage {

public SQLITEProfilePropertyPage() {
super(ISQLITEConnectionProfileConstants.SQLITE_CATEGORY_ID);
}
}

And that's really all there is to it.

Now we can test to make sure our wizard and property pages work.

From the Data Source Explorer when you create a new connection profile, you'll see the list of available profile types.

Once you've created it and connected, you can drill in and see something like this:

And to test the property pages, you can right-click on your profile and select Properties.

So now we have the start of SQLite support in DTP!

In the next article, I'll explain some of the bits and pieces we can do to clean this up and make it easier for users. Things like automatically creating the driver definition if the driver plug-in wrapper happens to be in the Eclipse environment.

Hopefully this has helped somebody doing some DTP development.

If you'd like to see me focus on other parts of DTP dev, let me know and I'll see what I can pull together. I'd love for some community-inspired questions to pop up!

Until next time...
--Fitz

DTP's Been Babel-ized!

2008-08-28T12:06:00.004-06:00

Image via Wikipedia Hi all!

Just thought I'd share some cool news from DTP land. I received word from Denis (via Bugzilla) that the initial translations for DTP's 1.6 (Ganymede) release have been added to Babel! Yay!

I would like to thank the folks who helped get us going with translations in Babel:

Antoine Toulmé
Yasuo Doshiro
Denis Roy
and Kit Lo

So thanks to everybody who helped get us started. Pretty soon we'll be able to have DTP in Klingon (probably not, but it's an interesting concept at any rate!)!

--Fitz

Creating an Actual SQLite Connection Profile (minus the UI)

2008-08-20T08:00:00.002-06:00

Hi there!

So now we have the majority of our work done. We have a driver-wrapper plug-in, a driver definition, and an overridden catalog loader. What's next? Wrapping the functionality in a nice, easy to use connection profile!

Note: Previous articles in this series cover the following topics: Catalog Loaders, Driver Templates, and the Driver Framework.

Many moons ago, we talked at a high level about the driver template & driver definition frameworks. It's now time to talk briefly about the connection profile framework.

It all boils down to this... A connection profile manages a connection to something. Right now in DTP we connect to JDBC databases and file systems for the most part. But the Sybase WorkSpace product also uses DTP to connect to application servers, LDAP, UDDI repositories, and much more. So it's not limited in any way.

With that in mind, a JDBC database connection profile, such as the one we want to create for SQLite, just needs to manage a JDBC connection under the covers. We'll add a layer on top of that to attach the SQL Model to the connection so we can display the database specifics in the Data Source Explorer tree.

In the DTP Ganymede (1.6) release, we've really simplified creating a new connection profile if it's associated with a db definition vendor/version and a driver template. So we'll take advantage of that for SQLite.

To create a connection profile, we will go to the org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite plug-in project and create a couple of classes and two extension points. These steps are kind of chicken & egg - the order isn't really important so long as you get them all done.

Step 1: Create a new connection factory and connection class for SQLite. These are the actual raw connections that our SQLite connection profile will manage for us.

The connection class is pretty easy. We're just going to extend the Generic JDBC JDBCConnection class for SQLite so we have our own specialized version of it.

That code looks like this:

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connection;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.IConnectionProfile;
import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.generic.JDBCConnection;

public class SQLITEJDBCConnection extends JDBCConnection {

/**
* @param profile
* @param factoryClass
*/
public SQLITEJDBCConnection(IConnectionProfile profile,
                              Class factoryClass) {
super(profile, factoryClass);
}
}

The connection factory requires a little more work, but not much more:

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connection;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.IConnection;
import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.IConnectionProfile;
import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.generic.JDBCConnectionFactory;

public class SQLITEJDBCConnectionFactory extends JDBCConnectionFactory {

public SQLITEJDBCConnectionFactory() {
super();
}

public IConnection createConnection(IConnectionProfile profile) {
SQLITEJDBCConnection connection = new SQLITEJDBCConnection(profile, getClass());
connection.open();
return connection;
}
}

Basically in the connection factory, we're just creating one of our new SQLiteJDBCConnection class instances for the profile that's passed in.

Step 2: We want to add a new extension point to the plugin.xml in the org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite plug-in project: org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.connectionProfile.
This extension point has a couple of nodes we're going to create beneath it: connectionFactory and connectionProfile.

Let's define our connectionProfile first, so we have the connection profile ID to use for the connectionFactory.

You can see from the screen that we're giving our connection profile the following properties:

id = org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connectionProfile
category = org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.category (this ensures that our connection profile shows up under the "Databases" category in the DSE)
name = SQLite Connection Profile
icon = icons/jdbc_16.gif (you can copy this from the Generic JDBC connection profile plug-in)
pingFactory = org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connection.SQLITEJDBCConnectionFactory (our new connection factory class we created in step 1)

Then we define our connectionFactory:

Our connectionFactory extension has the following properties:

id = java.sql.Connection (this maps to the type of connection this connection factory/connection class maps back to -- in this case, a JDBC connection)
class = org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connection.SQLITEJDBCConnectionFactory (our connection factory class)
profile = org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.connectionProfile (our SQLite connection profile ID from the connectionProfile extension)
name = SQLite Connection Factory

So now we have a connection profile for SQLite in DTP. Now all we need is a user interface (wizard, wizard page, property page, and driver UI) and we'll be golden!

That's what we'll cover next time.
--Fitz

Eclipse's e4 vs. Microsoft's e7

2008-08-19T11:55:00.002-06:00

Hey all...

This is slightly off topic... But I just saw an interesting post over at PC Magazine's site... Evidently the Microsoft Windows 7 team has created a new blog (you can see it here) and the shorthand term for Windows 7 is e7.

Isn't it kind of odd in the year when e4 is getting ramped up for Eclipse that Microsoft would also have their own "e" term for a release? I guess there *are* only 26 letters in the alphabet... So there's a *chance* (small, but there) it was random...

Anybody else have any thoughts?
--Fitz

DTP SQLite support continued... on to Catalog Loaders...

2008-08-07T16:47:00.006-06:00

Hi all...

Yes, it's been a while since I wrote the last article in this series. I apologize for that. This summer has been busy both at work and home (not like I got to go on a cruise like Ed Merks or anything, but we've been bouncing around!). So the series of articles fell by the wayside a bit.

That said... Let's get back to it. When we last left our intrepid coders, we were working through the steps of trying to get SQLite to connect and show its underlying model (schemas/tables/procedures, etc.) in the Data Source Explorer. We had just finished creating some driver templates (see that article here) and that didn't really buy us all that much.

The next step is to then create a custom catalog loader to take care of any shortcomings of the SQLite driver. We have a db definition (vendor/version) to hang the catalog loader from, which means we just have to choose which level to focus on first.

In this case, since we're interested in schemas as the highest level of the model for SQLite, we'll override the schema catalog loader.

To do this, we need to do a things.

1) In the plug-in manifest editor (opened either from MANIFEST.MF or plugin.xml) for the org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite plug-in project, we need to add a new dependency. Select the Dependencies tab in the manifest editor and add org.eclipse.connectivity.sqm.core. This will provide one of the extension points that we need to extend to override the catalog loader.

2) On the Extensions tab, add a new extension and select org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.core.catalog. Right-click on the extension and select "overrideLoader". Then select the "overrideLoader" node in the extension tree. You should see something like the following:

Product and version equate directly to the db definition that we've already created. Provider is the actual loader class we'll override the default with. And eclass is the SQL model class that we want to override the loader for our SQLite databases.

In this case:

* product = SQLITE
* version = 3.5.9
* eclass = org.eclipse.datatools.modelbase.sql.schema.Schema
* provider = a new class we'll create called SQLiteSchemaLoader

The SQLiteSchemaLoader looks something like this:

package org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.loader;

import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.core.rte.ICatalogObject;
import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.loader.IConnectionFilterProvider;
import org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.loader.JDBCSchemaLoader;

public class SQLiteSchemaLoader extends JDBCSchemaLoader {

public SQLiteSchemaLoader(ICatalogObject catalogObject,
    IConnectionFilterProvider connectionFilterProvider) {

    super(catalogObject, connectionFilterProvider);

}
}

Since SQLite has no concept of a "schema", we need to dummy one up so that the model is satisfied. (Yes, this is one more case where the loose JDBC "standard" bites us in the rear when we try to adhere to it.) To do that, we really only need to focus on overriding a couple of key methods:

* protected void initialize(Schema schema, ResultSet rs) throws SQLException
* public void loadSchemas(List containmentList, Collection existingSchemas) throws SQLException

In the default JDBCSchemaLoader, it relies on the driver to provide a result set of schemas. In the SQLite case, since there are none, we need to change the behavior to just dummy up a schema object and pass it along.

So loadSchemas becomes:

public void loadSchemas(List containmentList, Collection existingSchemas)
throws SQLException {
Schema schema = (Schema) getAndRemoveSQLObject(existingSchemas,
        "DEFAULT");
if (schema == null) {
    schema = processRow(null);
    if (schema != null) {
        containmentList.add(schema);
    }
}
else {
    containmentList.add(schema);
    if (schema instanceof ICatalogObject) {
        ((ICatalogObject) schema).refresh();
    }
}
}

And initialize is changed to ignore the result set and just name the schema "DEFAULT":

protected void initialize(Schema schema, ResultSet rs) throws SQLException {
schema.setName("DEFAULT");
}

The last thing we have to do is make our catalog loader class actually run as an executable extension. If we don't add the following constructor, you get an InstantiationException, which is always a pain to track down:

public SQLiteSchemaLoader() {
super(null);
}

Once the dummy schema is in place, the driver actually does return the tables list correctly, as seen in the following screen shot.

However... It appears that the SQLite driver does not return getImportedKeys() directly (it throws a "not yet implemented" SQLException for me), so we will need to clean up the JDBCTableConstraintLoader before we're done, but we can do that during code cleanup. (We'll also have to remove some of the nodes that don't make sense for a SQLite database, such as Authorization IDs, Stored Procedures and User-defined Functions.)

So now we have a (mostly) working catalog loader that will connect to a SQLite database and allow us to drill in and see tables and columns.

In the next article we'll walk through the simplified process for creating a brand new connection profile (wizard, wizard page, property page, connection factory, and connection classes). And then we can talk about the clean up phases and some of the nice things we can do to help out our users and developers.

Hope that helps!

--Fitz

Ever wonder how to get a Database from a Connection Profile?

2008-07-22T10:34:00.009-06:00

Hi all!

Have you ever wondered how to get a DTP SQL Model Database object from a connected connection profile? I seem to run into this problem infrequently, but always have to go through many gyrations to find the answer.

Larry from IBM, another member of the Connectivity team, was kind enough to provide the answer. It resulted in this chunk of code:

public Database getDatabaseForProfile (IConnectionProfile profile) {
  IManagedConnection managedConnection = ((IConnectionProfile)profile).
   getManagedConnection("org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.core.connection.ConnectionInfo"); 

  if (managedConnection != null) { 
   try {
    ConnectionInfo connectionInfo = (ConnectionInfo) managedConnection.
     getConnection().getRawConnection(); 
    if (connectionInfo != null) { 
     return connectionInfo.getSharedDatabase();         
    }
   } catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
   }
  } 
  return null;
 }

(Sorry the code's not pretty. I haven't found a great way of including code in Blogger blog posts yet.)

Basically under the covers there is a ConnectionInfo connection adapter that is used to map between the java.sql.Connection object we get from JDBC and the SQL model that's populated via the catalog loaders.

So there you have it! Not that many people have a need for such a thing, but it's handy just in case!

--Fitz

How are YOU using DTP?

2008-07-17T12:53:00.007-06:00

Hi all!

Now that the Ganymede release has gone out the door, DTP 1.6 has been released into the wild.

We in the DTP project would like to know how you are using DTP -- either as an end user, an adopter, or an extender. Are you using it to help with day to day database development tasks? Are you integrating with it from different projects in Eclipse such as BIRT, WTP, or JPA?

Though we're working on our first maintenance release for September, we're also starting to plan our next major release due in June 2009 along with the rest of the Eclipse Release Train. So we want to know what you would like to see in the next major release.

What do you like? What don't you like? We're here to help our community grow and develop. But to help us do that, we need guidance from the very folks who are using our stuff or looking at using it.

Let us know! Either by leaving a comment on this blog entry or by posting a message to the DTP newsgroup or mailing list!

Thanks!
--Fitz

New DTP Ganymede Video at Eclipse Live

2008-06-27T10:06:00.004-06:00

Hi all!

Just thought I'd let you know as part of the Ganymede release, Ian had most of the main projects create 15-20 minute videos to include on Eclipse Live to highlight what's new and cool in Ganymede.

Well, I'm happy to say that the DTP demo is live. :)

You can take a look at it here.

Please be gentle, as it's my first live demo video. :)

Thanks!
--Fitz

DTP T-shirts... Get your t-shirts here...

2008-06-25T09:03:00.004-06:00

Hey all...

In honor of the Eclipse Ganymede release and DTP's 1.6 release, I put together a t-shirt design so you can share your DTP love with the world. It's not much, but it's colorful and after one revision yesterday (thanks Linda!) I think it includes a majority of DTP projects, components, and terms in a creative way.

Pick one up to share with your friends and coworkers. :)

Thanks to everyone involved with DTP's Ganymede release!

--Fitz

Eclipse Ganymede is Released Into the Wild! (Repost)

2008-06-24T09:22:00.008-06:00

Hi all...

It should be common knowledge, but Eclipse Ganymede (also known as Eclipse 3.4) is being released today! As said by the Eclipse folks (thanks Ian for writing a great press release as always) - "The Ganymede Release is a coordinated release of 23 different Eclipse project teams and represents over 18 million lines of code." It's an enormous undertaking by a diverse group of people, projects, and companies, so kudos to everyone involved!

Along with Ganymede is the next major release of DTP (version 1.6). With this release, we add some new functionality and streamline some of what was already there...

One of the things that people have asked for over the last few releases has been a graphical SQL query editor. And it's finally there! Yay!

There is still a bunch of work left to do with it, but for a first release I think it works great. I'm not a big fan of hand-coding joins in SQL statements and this makes it VERY easy to do that. Just click and drag!

Beyond that, we did a ton of work on usability in DTP 1.6 also. We've streamlined the process for creating driver definitions and connection profiles to the point where it only takes a few clicks before you're connecting to and drilling into the Data Source Explorer to view your databases. So a big thank you goes out to Max at JBoss and the Zend folks and everyone else who provided valuable feedback during our prototyping and implementation of these changes.

It's been a heck of a year, but I think DTP is better and stronger than ever. We will get started shortly on our first maintenance release (1.6.1, due out in September) and planning for the next major Eclipse release (in June 2009).

As always, we depend on the community for support and guidance going forward. As you start to explore our Ganymede release, keep an eye to the future and let us know what you'd like to see us do by next June!

Thanks to everyone involved in the DTP 1.6 release -- from Sybase, Actuate, IBM, JBoss, Zend, Ingres, and all those who I can't remember at the moment. Everyone take a bow as the curtain drops on Ganymede, enjoy a brief rest, and then it'll be time to get going again!

--Fitz

How do you add your own custom driver template? (Repost)

2008-06-24T09:10:00.006-06:00

Hi all...

Sorry there's been a bit of a lag between articles. We've been busy trying to get Ganymede out the door and start planning for the future (maintenance releases for 1.6 plus the next major release of DTP for next June). I need to ditch my crystal ball for a magic eight ball I think. :)

Anyway... This week we're going to chat about how to create a new custom driver template.

First of all, when would you want to do this? There are a few possibilities:

You're creating support for a new database type not currently covered by DTP Enablement.
You want to add support for a third-party driver (such as DataDirect or jTDS) for a currently supported database.
You simply want to add an alternative driver template to complement an existing driver that adds properties or changes default values for use in your application(s).

That said, let's pick #1. We can use it as an example to provide functionality through this article series and eventually add some new database support to DTP Enablement.

For this example, let's work on SQLite support.

You can find a ton of information about SQLite on the SQLite home page (http://www.sqlite.org/). And you can grab the SQLite JDBC driver from the SQLiteJDBC page (http://www.zentus.com/sqlitejdbc/). So we'll grab the SQLite binaries for Windows (in my case) and the sqlitejdbc-v051-bin.tgz for this case. (You'll need to put the sqlitejdbc.dll in your JRE's or SDK's JRE bin directory to get this working.)

Typically the process I work through when deciding whether or not we need a custom connection profile for a given database is as follows:

Can I create a new Generic JDBC driver definition that references the jar (sqlitejdbc-v051-native.jar in this case)? Yes.
Can I then create a new Generic JDBC connection profile that uses my driver definition from (1) to connect to the database? Yes.
Can I browse into the database to see schemas, tables, stored procedures, and the like? Unfortunately not in this case.

This means we need to go a step further and go through these stages:

Stage 1: Create a new Database Definition for our Database
Stage 2: Create a new Driver Template for our Database (and the associated UI)
Stage 3: Create a new Connection Profile for our Database
Stage 4: Create a Custom Catalog Loader for our Database

So let's start with Stage 1 and get Stage 2 started today...

For each database that is supported in DTP and presents its structure in the Data Source Explorer (DSE), we have to tell the base models what the database supports. This is represented by the Database Definition (or "DB Definition"). What data types does it handle? Does it handle aliases or triggers? What kinds of constraints?

The DB Definition file itself is simply an XMI file (an XML file that provides metadata for some other XML files). In this case, it maps back to an EMF model for the DB Definition.

I'm not going to go into the gory details here. But there's a good article on how to get started here (be sure to look at Scenario 2).

Basically we need to create an XMI file to tell DTP what basic properties this database adheres to. What data types does it support, does it have catalogs, and so on. Most of this information can be found in the database documentation.

To simplify the process a little, we have a sample Java file that can be customized to create a new XMI file. I've modified it somewhat to create the XMI file locally. And I'll post a zip with the necessary files on the DTP website so you can grab them at the end of this exercise.

Once that's created, you can create a plug-in wrapper called "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.dbdefinition". And in that plug-in wrapper we will use the org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.core.databaseDefinition extension point to tell DTP about it. Basically the databaseDefinition extension point just maps the XMI file to a named vendor and a named version. That's how the underlying systems will locate it. (You'll see the terms vendor and version appear later as we define our driver template as well.)

So now we have a DB Definition and a plug-in wrapper for it. Cool. Now we can move to the first part of Stage 2: Creating a driver template.

To create a new driver template, we'll start by creating another plug-in. This plug-in will house all the non-UI bits and pieces we want for our SQLite connection profile. We'll call it "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite".

In the manifest for our new SQLite plug-in, we will create a new org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.driverExtension extension. This extension point is used to register driver template categories and driver templates within the DTP framework.

Remember how we were talking about vendor and version earlier? Well, now we're going to map some driver template categories to them.

First we'll create a "SQLite" category, which maps back to the vendor name we chose earlier and has org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.driverCategory as a parent. All database drivers fall under this category in DTP so we can easily find them. We'll call our new category "SQLite" and give it an ID "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.driver.category".

Next, we'll create a "3.5.9" category, to map to the version we selected earlier (3.5.9 is the most recent version of SQLite I could find). This one will use our "SQLite" category as its parent. We'll call it "3.5.9", and give it an ID "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.3_5_9.category"

Lastly we'll create the driver template itself. We'll give it the name "SQLite JDBC Driver" (not very original, but easy to remember) and an ID "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.3_5_9.driver". We'll set it to our SQLite 3.5.9 parent category so it has some context, setting it to the category ID we made a second ago "org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.sqlite.3_5_9.category".

We know it needs a driver jar, so we'll provide a default jar name as "sqlitejdbc-v051-native.jar". If we get fancy later, we can provide some mechanisms to pre-populate the path to the local version of that jar, but for now we'll assume the user will be able to know where their jar is located and set it appropriately in the driver definition. (Yes, we'll talk about the "fancier" way to do this automatically later.)

Beyond that, we need to get a few key bits of information about the driver. Based on the documentation for SQLite, it appears that we require the following property values:

Driver Class: org.sqlite.JDBC
JDBC URL: jdbc:sqlite:test.db

Easy enough, right? Well, we also require a few other things for a standard driver definition:

Vendor: SQLite
Version: 3.5.9
Database name: TEST (we can extrapolate this from the sample URL)
User ID: (not applicable, so we just leave it blank)

With these basic bits and pieces, we have defined our driver template! Whew. Took a bit of work though, I know.

That said, we now have reusable bits we can take into the next part of this process, which is creating a connection profile that can use our new driver definition and driver template.

At this point we're just laying the ground work. You can find a zip with the plug-ins created during this exercise here.

So next time we'll look at creating a basic connection profile that can actually use these bits!

--Fitz

The DTP Driver Framework (Repost)

2008-06-24T09:03:00.003-06:00

Hi all...

In this article, we're going to cover an introduction to the DTP Driver Framework. What are Driver Templates/Driver Definitions? What do we do with them? Where does the UI fit in? Where does the properties provider fit in? Can I make a Driver Template into a hat? Where does the Database Definition fit in?

All of these questions and more will be answered by the end of the article, I hope.

So let's start with an easy one. What is a Driver Template? A Driver Template is a named collection of properties needed to define a usable Driver Definition.

A Driver Definition is a real instance of a Driver Template, with specific paths to driver jars or particular information to help users of that driver to create a Connection Profile that uses it.

We'll cover Connection Profiles in another article, but note that Driver Templates and Driver Definitions are optional for Connection Profiles. We use them for JDBC Connection Profiles because they provide an easy way to manage drivers and driver jars without duplicating that information in each Connection Profile instance.

Basically we have ([] = optional):

[Driver Template -> Driver Definition] -> Connection Profile

Each Driver Template can fall into one parent category, but categories can be split up in many ways. For example, we have a Database category, and then break that down by Vendor (IBM, Sybase, etc.) and Version (DB2 8.1, ASE 15, etc.). These categories provide groupings for Templates so we can refer to a parent category of Templates in particular controls used for Connection Profile creation/editing - like the DriverListCombo. You can give the DriverListCombo a category ID (like the one for Derby driver templates for example) and it will grab all of the Driver Definitions that use Driver Templates that fall under that category or any of its child categories.

(Brief sidebar... In Europa and before, we used to display Driver Definitions on the Driver Definitions preference page in a tree that followed this scheme... Databases -> Vendor -> Version -> Driver Definition, but now in Ganymede we arrange this differently so it's easier to sort by vendor or version or category to get at what you're looking for.)

Think of a Driver Template as a basic set of properties needed for a driver. Driver Templates require a unique ID, a name, and a parent category. Though jar lists are required for managing JDBC drivers, they're not mandatory for all Driver Templates, so you can specify if an empty jar list is ok. You can also provide a default name for Driver Definitions that use the Template as well as a class that can programmatically provide values for properties when Driver Definitions are created.

In addition, you can provide a list of other properties for the Driver Template. It's quite customizable. For JDBC templates, we require:

Driver Class
Vendor
Version
Database Name
Connection URL
User ID
Password

As an example, the Derby Embedded JDBC Driver template for version 10.0 of Derby has the following basic properties:

id = org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.derby.genericDriverTemplate
name = %DERBY_EMBEDDED_DRIVER_TEMPLATE_NAME (which resolves to "Derby Embedded JDBC Driver")
description = (but this may be used in the future in the Driver Definition UI as a tooltip)
parentCategory = org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.derby.10_0.driverCategory, which is a child category of org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.derby.driverCategory, which is a child category of org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.driverCategory (so you can see the hierarchy - all Database drivers fall under "org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.db.driverCategory", and then Derby further defines it to a "Derby" category and then a category for "10.0" beneath that)
jarList = derby.jar (multiple jars could be specified here, and this property can be further modified by the valuesProvider class)
createDefault = false (indicates whether we should create a default Driver Definition for this template when a new workbench is created for the first time)
emptyJarListIsOK = false (indicates that a jar list is required for this Derby 10.0 template)
valuesProvider = org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.apache.internal.derby.driver.DerbyDriverValuesProvider101 (this is a class that implements the IDriverValuesProvider interface and is used in the Derby case to see if one of two JDBC driver file plug-in wrappers exists in the workbench - if it does, it will create a Driver Definition by default, changing the jarList to have a valid path to the jar and setting createDefault to true)
defaultDefinitionName = %DERBY_EMBEDDED_DRIVER_DEFAULT_INSTANCE_NAME (resolves to "Derby Embedded JDBC Driver 10.0" and is used if the valuesProvider finds the right plug-ins and creates a default Driver Definition)

Then when a Driver Definition is instantiated for that Driver Template, it uses the values from the Driver Template as defaults and allows the user to modify them. Think of this as a concrete instance of a template. Sort of like a Microsoft Word template used to create a Microsoft Word document. The template just suggests some defaults for the document, but the document is the actual file being modified.

So with our Derby example, we create an instance of the Derby Driver Template that takes those defaults and allows the user to modify the values to make the Driver Definition "valid". This means in effect that a) any jar files specified in the jar/zip files list are accessible and b) any required properties have values. We point to a concrete path for our derby.jar file, maybe modify the default JDBC url and user name for our basic installation, and we're on our way.

As we mentioned earlier, if the valuesProvider class finds an appropriate plug-in wrapper for the Derby driver, it will create the Driver Definition by default and the user won't have to modify it unless they need to tweak the defaults for their installation.

Once we have a Driver Definition defined for a given database type, we can then create a Connection Profile that uses the properties of the Driver Definition as defaults (jar list and driver class are shared between the Driver Definition and the Connection Profile), and we can specialize our Profile details further, perhaps adding some optional properties to the url, a unique port or database name/path, or providing a more specific user name/password combination.

Now... I mentioned in my introduction last week that you can do more with Driver Templates and Driver Definitions than just use them in database Connection Profiles.

What if you want to define some basic communication protocols for a particular Connection Profile to consume? For example, you might define an "e-mail" driver that doesn't have any jars, but defines the basic properties of an SMTP server vs. a POP3 server vs. some other e-mail server type. So you could have two or three Driver Definitions that get consumed by an e-mail Profile (nobody's written one yet, want to volunteer?) to access and display e-mail sitting on a server somewhere.

Or maybe you want to use DTP to help manage connections to application servers? There's a wide variety of those... JBoss or Tomcat or EAServer or any number of others... Why not come up with a common Connection Profile that consumes "application server" Driver Definitions to show... message queues or provide administration functionality to start/stop a server, or view the log for the server.

Perhaps you're playing with social networking sites and you want to come up with a common set of functionality across them... Would you be able to perhaps use OpenSocial with DTP to provide that functionality?

There are a ton of possibilities to explore.

Think of Driver Templates and Driver Definitions as helpers for Connection Profiles. They're not required, but they can provide a place to share common details among profiles so you don't have to duplicate it in a bunch of profiles. For example, what if you have a bunch of database Profiles that don't use the Driver Framework and you want to update your driver class/jar list for a new version of the JDBC driver? Depending on how you implemented it, your user might have to go into each and every Profile that references the old files/driver class and update them by hand. Or if you use the Driver Framework, you update it in one place and the very next time you connect, it gets picked up automatically by the Profile.

So what do you think? Can you think of places where it would be handy to use DTP's Connection Profile and Driver Frameworks to meet a need?

As always, holler if you have questions or think I'm making this stuff up as I go along. I value the input of the community. There's LOTS of room to explore to see where we can take the DTP frameworks and I'm happy to be along for the ride!

Next week we'll start talking about how to implement your own custom Driver Templates.

Until next time...

--Fitz

DTP Article Series Introduction (Reposted)

2008-06-24T08:59:00.004-06:00

Hi all...

I am going to be writing about some of the cool things you can do with the Data Tools Project (DTP) and how you can set up your own connection profiles for a variety of purposes. My goal with this series of articles is to provide a baseline for more people to understand the DTP frameworks for connectivity so they may build on them or use them in any way they see that's useful.

DTP is more than databases. Anyone who's played with BIRT realizes that ODA, which is a part of DTP Connectivity, shows the potential for accessing a variety of data sources, from comma separated files and XML to the variety of databases we support today through the DTP Enablement project. Though SQL is cool, it's nice to have the ability to have a consistent interface to your data when you're working in Eclipse.

So I'm going to break this into a series of articles and try to post fairly regularly -- probably one a week or so -- to cover the various bits and pieces of the DTP Connectivity frameworks and how a developer could use these bits and pieces in their own tools.

We're going to cover Driver Templates and Driver Definitions first, which might seem a bit odd considering what I said just a couple of paragraphs ago about DTP being more than just databases. However, Sybase has used driver templates in a few ways beyond just for JDBC drivers. We used them to describe properties of a security specification that could then be expanded on by adopters and users for their own purposes. Templates can be anything you want them to be and we'll cover some possible uses of the driver framework in the first series of articles.

Once we've covered drivers, we'll start talking about catalog loaders. Unlike drivers, catalog loaders are definitely a database-specific thing at this point, leveraging the Database Definition and SQL Model from the DTP Model Base project to populate a rich EMF model with JDBC-related information about a particular database. This allows you to do a variety of cool things with the SQL model.

And lastly, but definitely not least, we'll then cover the connection profile framework. Here's another area, like the driver framework, where you're not limited to databases. A connection profile can connect to a JDBC database, a CSV file, an XML file, or whatever you'd like to browse. By integrating with the Platform's Common Navigator Framework, you can integrate with file systems or FTP providers, or application servers, or newsgroups if you want to make a newsgroup reader -- pretty much anything you can connect to and pull back information from, you can make a connection profile for.

So as you can see, there's a lot of functionality available in DTP. I'll do what I can to help write about the various aspects of DTP Connectivity that you may not have known about.

As always, if you have questions, post them in the comments, post them on the newsgroup, post them on the mailing list -- wherever it's convenient for you to do so. And we'll do our best to get them answered in a timely manner.

Thanks for your time! Next week we'll start talking about the Driver framework.

--Fitz

DTP Blog, Take 2...

2008-06-24T08:28:00.000-06:00

Hi all...

You might have noticed some funky posts hogging the top spots on Planet Eclipse over the weekend. Sorry about that. The blogging software that Sybase is using isn't the greatest. Though it allowed me to schedule posts for the future, it didn't afford the same functionality to the RSS feeds, which messed everybody up. (Sorry Denis, Gunnar, and Ian).

However, after talking a bit with the folks handling the blogs, it was decided I should just create a separate blog in Wordpress or Blogger... Though I like Wordpress better (I use it for my personal blogs), it was having issues with getting a new free account created -- so here I am at Blogger!

Anyway... I feel bad about the switch, but hopefully this means you won't have to see my posts over and over and over again. I'm sure once is enough on Planet Eclipse for everybody. :)

I'm going to repost my articles so far on the Driver Framework, but promise I won't go any further than that.

Thanks for your patience!
--Fitz