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The holy war about spaces or tabs continues and you can see all sorts of arguments for each side raging around the internet.

I prefer spaces because it’s a consistent format that remains the same no matter what you are using.  With tabs things appear differently depending on how your editor or other program is configured.  Plus the worst thing is when spaces and tabs get intermixed.

Arguments for tabs such as they take up less room or it’s easier to move around are in my mind weak.  In this day of terabyte disk drive, file size differences between tabs and spaces are trivial and most of your disk space is taken up by images and binary files anyway.  And being able to move around and format quickly is not an issue either with modern editors.

The two editors I use most are XEmacs and Eclipse.  Below I describe how to use spaces for indents for each program.

In Emacs:

(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)  ; Use spaces for indents except
                                     ; in buffers that already have
                                     ; their own local values for the
                                     ; variable.

In Eclipse:

I was about to write a post about how much I was starting to dislike Eclipse. Two years ago I was singing the praises of Eclipse but Eclipse Europa (version 3.3) in my opinion has been a disaster. It is incredibly slow, crashes often, runs out of memory, etc. I found myself at times using XEmacs instead because it was faster.

But today I installed Eclipse Ganymede (version 3.4) and so far life has been much better.  It is much more responsive, it is not crashing, things are running smoothly.   You can read about what is New and Noteworthy in Ganymede.  The most exciting new feature to me is the Retain case of match when replacing, just like XEmacs.

Also I noticed that in my JBoss project, hot swapping of code is again working.  I am not sure if this is because I upgraded to Ganymede or because I turned on “Build Automatically”.  I suspect it might be the latter.

Previously I was using an old Maven integration for Eclipse, version 0.0.11, which I got from http://m2eclipse.codehaus.org/update.  The plugin was horribly slow and seemed to sometimes interfere with my builds.

Today I upgraded to the latest, version 0.9.4, from http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/ and things are moving much more smoothly.  You can learn more at Maven Integration for Eclipse.

Now if someone would improve the Perforce plugin…

Recently I have been having problems with Eclipse running out of memory.

Previously I had as my command line argument for Eclipse.

eclipse.exe -vmargs --Xmx512m

The double dashes were a problem, preventing Eclipse to properly load the correct memory settings from eclipse.ini.

I then removed the -vmargs –Xmx512m from the command line argument and instead modified eclipse.ini which is in the top level of the Eclipse installation. This blog article, Eclipse and memory settings, explains how you should put each argument on a separate line and that you can go to Help > About Eclipse Platform and then click on the Configuration Details button to check that Eclipse is running with the correct settings.

I changed this:

-Xms40m
-Xmx512m

to:

-Xms120m
-Xmx1024m

but I reverted back when I realized it was my original command line argument that was the problem.

I tried to use these settings as recommended in this forum, [news.eclipse.tools.jdt] Re: How to prevent out of memory errors?

-Xms120m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:PermSize=256M
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M

But for some reason that kept crashing the Eclipse startup.

In a previous post, Shell Scripts with Windows LF’s Fail in Latest Cygwin, I wrote about how to use Perforce to check out all files in UNIX format. However if you use Eclipse then this solution will not work because Eclipse always inserts Windows LF’s in any line you insert into a file leading to a mess with files that have both UNIX and Windows LF’s.

However if you happen to use Maven to generate / copy your shell scripts to their target directories you can take advantage of the lineEnding property in the Assembly Director. If you specify the lineEnding property to be “unix” then the outputted shell scripts will be in UNIX format. For example:

<file>
  <source>src/main/scripts/foo.sh</source>
  <outputDirectory>bin</outputDirectory>
  <lineEnding>unix</lineEnding>
</file>

Eclipse was complaining in its Java Build Path panel that it did not know what MAVEN2_CLASSPATH_CONTAINER was. Searching around I realized that it was because I had not installed the Maven plugin.

After installing and restarting I went to Project > Update All Maven Dependencies to pull down all the dependencies.

My laptop unexpectedly shutdown when I had Eclipse open. After rebooting I could not start Eclipse. Instead it kept crashing with the message “An error has occurred. See the log file …” Looking at the log file I saw errors related to the Perforce plugin.

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
        at org.eclipse.ui.internal.themes.ThemeElementHelper.installFont(ThemeElementHelper.java:101)

org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Exception in org.eclipse.core.internal.compatibility.PluginActivator.start() of bundle com.perforce.team.ui.
        at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleContextImpl.startActivator(BundleContextImpl.java:1010)
Caused by: java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
        at com.perforce.team.ui.PerforceUIPlugin.initializeDefaultPreferences(PerforceUIPlugin.java:284)

I saw a post about this problem which referred to another post for a solution. Basically the post suggests that stale plugin cache information is causing the problem and suggests starting Eclipse with the -clean argument. After doing this I was successfully able to launch Eclipse.

Currently there is a bug with Eclipse and generating the serial version UID. When attempting to generate a serial version UID you will see a dialogue window which says “Computing serial version ID….” and “Starting virtual machine…”. Unfortunately this hangs and you are forced to kill your Eclipse IDE. I started seeing this bug after installing some JDBC plugins and the GEF plugin, I’m not sure if it’s related to that. I tried disabling the plugins but I still see the problem. Before I wasn’t having this problem.

I noticed that I haven’t encountered this problem on other installations of Eclipse, even w/ the JDBC plugins, so could just be that I have a bad build of Eclipse.

I was previously using DbVisualizer to query and update my Oracle databases and was not completely satisfied with it. I actually prefer PhpMyAdmin but that only works with MySQL.

Since I use Eclipse so much for development I decided to look for a JDBC plugin that is at least as good as DbVisualizer. My goal is to have in one workspace access to my database as well as my source and configuration files.

I went to EclipsePlugins and downloaded the three highest rated JDBC plugins, all which happen to be free (in some cases just for non-commercial use).

1. DBEdit
2. QuantumDB
3. SQLExplorer

I installed DBEdit 1.0.3_1, Quantum DB 3.0.1 (which requires GEF, I installed 3.1.1), SQLExplorer 2.2.4.

Setup was quite simple with DBEdit, just add the JDBC driver to the CLASSPATH, give it the JDBC URL and connect. Setup was almost as simple with Quantum DB though it asks you for the components of the JDBC URL instead of the URL directly. I couldn’t figure out how to setup SQLExplorer within five minutes so I gave up.

DBEdit and Quantum DB have similar interfaces and both are similar to DbVisualizer though Quantum DB’s appealed to me a little more. However Quantum DB’s interface responded much more quickly and querying of tables was much faster. DBEdit has a nice feature, which I did not completely test, of inline editing of cell values which seems quite powerful.

Because of Quantum DB’s speed and responsiveness I am going to continue to use that as my primary JDBC plugin but I will also keep DBEdit on the side to use for its inline editing but also in case I find Quantum DB does something in an unintuitive manner.

Update: Since I posted this less than a month ago I found DBEdit much more useful than Quantum DB. It’s inline editing, inserting feature, and other editing features really make it powerful. Also its filter, scrolling through result sets, etc. are great. I highly recommend DBEdit.

When I get someone’s Eclipse project I always ended up recreating the project. Now I won’t need to do that anymore since I learned about the Import feature.

1. Go to File > Import…
2. Select Existing Projects into Workspace
3. Select the root directory of the project
4. Press Finish and watch Eclipse wonderfully recreate the project.