DTP at JBoss

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 server, 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.

Creating the SQLite Connection Profile UI bits

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!