New themes for the Eclipse IDE
We have published a set of additional themes for the Eclipse IDE: AI Neon, Dracula, VS Code Dark, GitHub Dark, Nord and One Light. Each one is a pure resourc...
Recent Posts
Dead code removal in Eclipse platform and PDE
Every large Java code base carries code nobody calls any more. For future maintenance it is important to remove such dead code: every unused class still has ...
An MCP server for the Eclipse IDE
We have released an MCP server for the Eclipse IDE. It lets external LLM clients such as Claude Code or Cursor ask a running IDE for things they cannot cheap...
Visual Studio Code GitHub Copilot vs. Eclipse Theia AI
If you plan to build applications with AI support, especially for software development, you first need to decide which platform to use. You can build a plain...
AI Agent Orchestration
When talking about AI agents, we now often refer to Agentic AI workflows, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve complex goals. When creating Custom Ag...
Eclipse UI Best Practices and Icon Testing
The Eclipse UI Best Practices project works on icon packs with modernized icons for the Eclipse IDE.
Eclipse RCP Book - Fourth Edition
I’m happy to announce the release of the fourth edition of the Eclipse RCP book, updated for Eclipse 2025-12.
Getting Started with Theia AI
Eclipse Theia comes with quite extensive AI capabilities. This includes the usage of AI from a users perspective as well as from a developers perspective to ...
Extending Copilot in Visual Studio Code
In this tutorial I will explain how to extend Visual Studio Code with a customized AI experience. By creating a Visual Studio Code Copilot Extension, we will...
Getting Started with Eclipse Theia
In my blog post Getting Started with Visual Studio Code Extension Development I explained how to implement a Visual Studio Code Extension that contributes a ...
Multiple webviews in a single Visual Studio Code Extension
In my previous blog post Getting Started with Visual Studio Code Extension Development I described how to create a Visual Studio Code Extension that contribu...
Getting Started with Visual Studio Code Extension Development
Over the past years I wrote several blog posts about Java, Eclipse and OSGi. While I still like those technologies very much, I can’t ignore that Visual Stud...
OSGi Component Testing (2024 Edition)
In my last blog post I talked about Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services. In this blog post I want to show how to test OSGi service components. Thi...
OSGi Event Admin - Publish & Subscribe (2024 Edition)
In this blog post I want to write about the publish & subscribe mechanism in OSGi, provided via the OSGi Event Admin Service. Of course I will show this ...
Access OSGi Services via web interface (2024 Edition)
In this blog post I want to share a simple approach to make OSGi services available via web interface. I will show a simple approach that includes the follow...
Control OSGi DS Component Instances (2024 Edition)
There are use cases where a more fine grained control is needed for component instance creation. I spent some time in investigating how this is done with OS...
Configuring OSGi Declarative Services (2024 Edition)
In my blog post about Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services I provided an introduction to OSGi declarative services. How to create them, how they be...
Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services (2024 Edition)
In 2016 I wrote the first Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services blog post and several additional blog posts about OSGi DS. It was written for develo...
CRaCin` your OSGi application - start so fast I want to CRIU
When creating a new application, you nowadays need to think about all the different ways the application or its functionality will be consumed. The usage as ...
Build REST services with the OSGi Whiteboard Specification for Jakarta™ RESTful Web Services
Several years ago I wrote a blog post about creating a REST service out of an OSGi service. At that time I used the OSGi R7 JAX-RS Whiteboard Specification a...
Getting Started with OSGi Remote Services - PDE Edition
At the EclipseCon Europe 2016 I held a tutorial together with Peter Kirschner named Building Nano Services with OSGi Declarative Services. The final exercise...
Getting Started with OSGi Remote Services - enRoute Maven Archetype Edition
At the EclipseCon Europe 2016 I held a tutorial together with Peter Kirschner named Building Nano Services with OSGi Declarative Services. The final exercise...
Getting Started with OSGi Remote Services - Bndtools Edition
At the EclipseCon Europe 2016 I held a tutorial together with Peter Kirschner named Building Nano Services with OSGi Declarative Services. The final exercise...
Eclipse Extended Contribution Pattern
Working in the Panorama project, we developed several architectures and designs to improve the collaboration of heterogeneous systems. Although focused on au...
Eclipse RCP, Java 11, JAXB
With Java 11 several packages have been removed from the JRE itself, like JAXB. This means if you use JAXB in your Java application, you need to add the nece...
Inspecting the OSGi runtime - New ways for Eclipse projects
I often get asked how to find and solve issues in an OSGi runtime. Especially with regards to OSGi services. I then always answer that you have two options:
Build REST services with OSGi JAX-RS whiteboard
Some years ago I had a requirement to access the OSGi services inside my Eclipse application via web interface. Back then I used the OSGi HTTP Whiteboard Spe...
NatTable + Eclipse Collections = Performance & Memory improvements ?
Some time ago I got reports from NatTable users about high memory consumption when using NatTable with huge data sets. Especially when using trees, the row h...
NatTable - dynamic scaling enhancements
The last weeks I worked on harmonizing the scaling capabilities of NatTable. The first goal was to provide scaled versions of all internal NatTable images. T...
Building a headless RCP application with Tycho
Recently I got the request to create a “headless RCP” application from an existing Eclipse project. I was reading several posts on that and saw that a lot of...
POM-less Tycho enhanced
With Tycho 0.24 POM-less Tycho builds were introduced. This Maven extension was a big step forward with regards to build configuration, as plugin, feature an...
Add JavaFX controls to a SWT Eclipse 4 application – Eclipse RCP Cookbook UPDATE
I wrote about this topic already a while ago on another blog. But since then quite a few things have changed and I wanted to publish an updated version of th...
OSGi Event Admin - Publish & Subscribe
In this blog post I want to write about the publish & subscribe mechanism in OSGi, provided via the OSGi Event Admin Service. Of course I will show this ...
Access OSGi Services via web interface
In this blog post I want to share a simple approach to make OSGi services available via web interface. I will show a simple approach that includes the follow...
OSGi Declarative Services news in Eclipse Oxygen
With this blog post I want to share my excitement about the OSGi DS related news that are coming with Eclipse Oxygen. I want to use this blog post to inform ...
Control OSGi DS Component Instances via Configuration Admin
While trying to clean up the OSGi services in the Eclipse Platform Runtime I came across the fact that singleton service instances are not always feasible. F...
Control OSGi DS Component Instances
I recently came across some use cases where a more fine grained control is needed for component instance creation. I spent some time in investigating how thi...
Dependency injection for Eclipse 3.x views available for Eclipse 4.7 M3
You can now use dependency injection (di) in your Eclipse 3.x. views.You can enable this for a view via the new inject flag in the org.eclipse.ui.views exten...
Configuring OSGi Declarative Services
In my blog post about Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services I provided an introduction to OSGi declarative services. How to create them, how they be...
OSGi Component Testing
In my last blog post I talked about Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services. In this blog post I want to show how to test OSGi service components.
Getting Started with OSGi Declarative Services
In the last weeks I worked intensively on getting a deeper knowledge in OSGi declarative services. I use them for a while with Eclipse 4, but never had a de...
Joining the Eclipse Project Management Committee
I’m honored to join the Eclipse Project Management Committee (PMC) for the Eclipse Top-Level Project. See Eclipse project charter for their responsibilities.
Run an Eclipse 32-bit application from a 64-bit Eclipse IDE
Typically the development environment should not be dependent on the target environment the application should run on. For creating an Eclipse RCP applicatio...
OSGi - bundles / fragments / dependencies
In the last weeks I needed to look at several issues regarding OSGi dependencies in different products. A lot of these issues were IMHO related to wrong usag...
POM-less Tycho builds for structured environments
With Tycho 0.24 POM-less Tycho builds where introduced. That approach uses convention-over-configuration to reduce the number of redundant information for se...
Generic Eclipse 3.x views, editors and handlers with DI - by René Brandstetter
In this blog entry I will show you three independent features provided by Eclipse and OSGi which can work together to create views, editors or handlers via t...
Honored to become Eclipse PDE committer
I’m happy to announce that I was elected as PDE committer. This made the integration of the new png icons in PDE much easier. I plan to work on the PDE tem...
Honored to become Platform UI co-lead
It is a great honor to help in the role of the Platform UI co-Lead together with Paul Webster. Paul was in the past a great mentor for me and I’m very happy ...
NatTable context menus with Eclipse menus
In this blog post I will explain how to add context menus to a NatTable instance and how it is possible to combine menus configured via Eclipse Application M...
NatTable with custom scrollbars
When talking about styling a SWT control via CSS, one issue is raised quite early. The scrollbars can not be styled! Looking at a dark theme, the importance ...
Preferences Spy for Eclipse IDE and RCP
Motivation
Defining JDT code templates via the org.eclipse.ui.editors.templates extension point
I recently had again the need to define new Java code templates via a plug-in so that they can be easily shared among a group of developer. I finally took t...
Migration to JUnit 4
When you’re facing the issue to migrate your JUnit 3 tests to JUnit 4, it can be very annoying, because of course you all have a lot of tests. ;)
Accessing the caller information of a method in Java code
Sometimes it is nice to access the caller of a method. Doing this is relatively simple, you can use the getStackTrace() method on the current thread. This re...
Eclipse is not a terminal anymore - Default line size of Java code formatter is now 120
Approx. 3 years ago, I opened a bug report to increase the Java code formatter to 120. This is now implemented, and will be the new Eclipse JDT default for M...
Styling of Eclipse table headers (without SWT support)
Just for reference, the PyDev developer Fabio Zadrozny just posted a nice snippet with allows you to style your SWT table headers via CSS (with your register...
Eclipse 4 RCP migration - how to avoid Plugin.getDefault().getPreferenceStore()
Today I got the question how to avoid the usage of Plugin.getDefault().getPreferenceStore() to access preferences as for example in:
Eclipse and the Ubuntu team working together - Solving the Eclipse menu issue under Ubuntu
I’m very happy to report that the Eclipse platform team worked together with the Canonical Ubuntu team to solve the broken menu issue of Eclipse under Ubuntu...
Eclipse contributions - What difference can a single developer make?
I frequently hear that a single developer cannot make a difference for the Eclipse project. I think that is not true. The Eclipse project page show that in a...
How to contribute to the Eclipse Open Source project
As preparation for upcoming Eclipse Hackathons on EclipseCon US and the Eclipse Hackathon in Hamburg I updated my How to contribute to the Eclipse Open Sourc...
Dark Eclipse ships with Eclipse Luna
We (the Eclipse platform team) added a dark theme contributed by Andrea Guarinoni to Eclipse Luna M6. Lots of people were asking for a default dark theme. Of...
vogella with 60 000 daily visitors
The number of developers which use the free information provided by vogella.com continues to amaze me. Yesterdays we had 60 000 visitors on vogella.com. This...
Eclipse e4 tools - Update site for Kepler and Luna
The e4 tools master move on, so that they can only be used for Eclipse 4.4 (Luna). You find the latest Kepler version of the e4 tools under the following p2 ...
Porting Eclipse 3.x RCP application to Eclipse 4.4 - now without QuickAccess box
Lots of Eclipse 3.X RCP application which switched to Eclipse 4 as runtime complained that they get the QuickAccess search bar of the Eclipse IDE for “free”.
Less screen space waste in Eclipse 4.4
I’m really happy to report that we managed to solve Reduce whitespace usage in the default Eclipse themes . Such bugs are difficult to get agreement upon, as...
The small details in life: the focus restore
This blog should show you a small, often overlooked, problem within Eclipse e4 and it should also provide you with a possible solution.
New message extension update
I’m very happy and of course proud to see that the new message extension created by Tom Schindl and me is part of the Eclipse platform with Eclipse Luna M3.
Received Eclipse platform committer status
After contributing to the Eclipse platform for a while now, I’m proud to say that I received Eclipse platform committer rights last week. It is a great hono...
Eclipse Internationalization Part 4/4 – New Features by Dirk Fauth
Finally I found the time to write the last part of my blog post series about Eclipse internationalization with the new message extension created by Tom Schin...
Leap Motion in Eclipse 4
The Leap Motion device is out! Great news for all who waited for it.
Inject your JPA EntityManager into an Eclipse RCP application - Guest post by Nepomuk Seiler
Inject your JPA EntityManager
Eclipse Internationalization Part 3/4 – Migration by Dirk Fauth
In my previous blog post I explained the new message extension added to the E4 tools by Tom Schindl and me. It is similar to the Eclipse localization mechani...
Sending events to e4 applications from outside of e4
e4 uses an event bus to let different pieces (e.g. parts) of an e4 application communicate. Architecturally, this leads to low coupling (doubleplusgood) due ...
Eclipse Internationalization Part 2/4 – New Message Extension by Dirk Fauth and Tom Schindl
In my last blog post I explained the current available solutions for translating an Eclipse 4 application and what is wrong with them.
Eclipse Internationalization Part 1/4 - Current Situation by Dirk Fauth
If you are developing Eclipse applications and plugins for users around the world, you should prepare them to be translated into several languages. While in ...
Eclipse Papercut #12 Showing all templates in code completion
I just returned from the JAX conference where I had the pleasure to join a panel discussion about Eclipse. I argued in that panel that the community (includi...
Generate p2 composite repository metadata from Jenkins (Hudson) jobs on the fly
Serving p2 build artifacts from Jenkins is complicated if builds from multiple Jenkins jobs should be aggregated into a master p2 composite repository. A rat...
Want to try out NatTable 1.0.0? by Dirk Fauth
First of all: No NatTable 1.0.0 is not yet released!
Dynamic menu contributions in Eclipse 4 - Guest blog by Marco Descher
While with the Juno Release, Eclipse 4 has become the new standard, there is still some functionality from Eclipse 3.x which is missing, at least when it com...
Context functions in Eclipse RCP
Context functions in Eclipse RCP are powerful tools. They allow you to register for certain keys in the context and create objects for these keys lazily. I...
Cross/weak validation in NatTable by Dirk Fauth
Sometimes it is necessary to implement logic that validates one value against another in the same object. Having a fromDate and a toDate in your model object...
Eclipse 4 asynchronous processing and the event bus by Lars Vogel
Synchronizing yourself with the user interface thread in Eclipse 4 can be done with the getting an instance of UISynchronize injected and use this class to e...
Testing plain SWT with SWTBot by Dirk Fauth
SWTBot is a testing tool for testing Eclipse and SWT based applications. If you search for SWTBot you will find some tutorials and a documentation showing ho...
Tycho Advanced by Dirk Fauth
Reading the current literature regarding Eclipse 4 and Maven Tycho, I realized that some aspects on dependency management are not described. IMHO these aspec...
Migrating plug-ins from Eclipse 3.x to Eclipse 4 - getting ready for Eclipse 4
To migrate your Views and Editors to Eclipse 4 you can choice to use org.eclipse.e4.tools.compat plug-in from the e4 tooling projects. This bridge was develo...
Improved JDT Filtered PackageExplorer (for Eclipse 4.2.1)
I updated my JDT Filtered Package Explorer. It should now also work with ‘Top Level Elements > Working Sets’ as top level and should also the native “Canc...
Eclipse 4 and RAP - Continue the port
Last week Ralf Sternberg, Markus Knauer and I spend a second day in porting RAP to Eclipse4. Our start was a bit slow as we redid the changes we did the last...
Honored to be a Java Champion -
I’m very honored to be now part of the Java Champions Group.
Eclipse Papercut #9 - Default preference settings via plugin_customization.ini - Type Filter Example
Dani Megert gave me in the Eclipse forum the tip how setup default values preferences, in this example for for JDT type filters.
Eclipse Papercut #8 – Filtered PackageExplorer by project name
I recently learned from Ian Bull about Feature Patch Projects which allow you to patch existing features.
vogella GmbH founded
Today it is official, my company vogella Gmbh has been founded. Founding members are Jennifer Nerlich and myself.
Installing Eclipse features via the command line with the p2 director
I finally found the time to try out Paul Websters tip for installing Eclipse features from the command line and updating eclipse.ini. While I don’t have the ...
Thanks for the Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award 2012
Thanks everybody for voting me to the Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award 2012.
Running Eclipse 3.x RCP application on Eclipse 4
I updated Using the Compatibility Layer for Eclipse 3.x RCP applications tutorial with the latest information.
vogella.de gets a motto - “Because knowledge feels like magic”
Every company has a motto which should describe its primary purpose. Google has the “Don’t be evil” motto, Nike has “Just do it”, IBM has to my knowledge “Th...
Eclipse 4 RCP training available
A few weeks ago I heard from Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Day At Googleplex 2011 that Eclipse 4.2 will be the basis for the Juno release and Eclipse 3.8 w...
WindowBuilder Support for Eclipse 4 Parts in Juno
I’m happy to see that WindowBuilder will support Eclipse 4 in the Eclipse Juno release. See Bug Report for details.
The end of Eclipse 3.x
Currently we have in my option the unfortunate situation that Eclipse did fork itself into a 3.x and 4.x stream.
Leaving SAP - Into the Wild
After 10+1 years, I decided to leave SAP.
Eclipse - Setting the default perspective via config.ini
A quick tip for the Eclipse IDE (and also useful for Eclipse RCP). You can use the “config.ini” (in your Eclipse installation folder) to define a perspective.
vogella.de has a new logo
I was trying to find a good logo for vogella.de for some time now. I started with some abstract figures but I think this is currently a bit overused as I see...
Eclipse Secure storage of preferences
Eclipse allows to encrypt preference values via the plugin “org.eclipse.equinox.security”. The key/ value pairs will be stored in the file “secure.storage” i...
Eclipse Launcher - command line statement for starting your program
Eclipse allows you to start your program via the launcher framework which is very powerful and makes life simple.
SWT Style Bits - Bitwise Or and Bitwise And
Ever wondered how SWT Style bits work? It is actually very simple. The style bits are a multitud of 2
Drag and drop support for your parts within the workbench in Eclipse e4
Some of you may have noticed that you cannot drag and drop your parts (views and editors) within an Eclipse e4 application by default.
The persistence of e4
In Eclipse 3.x you can remember the current application state (the user’s layout and window size) between application sessions, via the setting configurer.se...
Eclipse Development - In which plugin do I find this class?
A common question for Eclipse Plugin or Eclipse RCP developer is in which plugin a certain class is included.
Reading resources from a Eclipse plugin
Frequenty you want to store static files in your bundle and load them from your bundle. For this you can use the following code, of course replace the bundle...
Getting the plugin which defines an extension point.
If you are like me you still use the Search dialog for plugins to find the definition plugin of an extension point.
Confessions of a public speaker - My key takeaways
I recently finished the book “Confessions of a public speaker” which was recommended to me by Kim Moir. I also can recommend this book; as it contains very g...
Thanks for the Eclipse Top Contributor Award
EclipseCon is almost a month ago and I would like to thank everyone for the honor of receiving the Eclipse Top Contributor Award 2010.
Eclipse p2 Composite Repositories - All the update sites you ever wanted
I frequently install new Integration builds from the Eclipse.org website. Afterwards I used to maintain all my desired update sites, for example EGit and Myl...
10 golden rules of asking questions in the OpenSource community
Based on my tutorial website I frequently receive questions from users. Some are very nice, precise, encouraging and some are of perceived bad quality. I a...
Presentation Zen
A while ago I read the book “Presentation Zen” from Garr Reynolds. Garrs website can be found at Presentation Zen .
Podcast from Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational” and OpenSource
Dan Ariely is the author of the book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” and discusses in this podcast his theories under th...
Getting the Eclipse Build ID
Eclipse Bugzilla ask you for your Eclipse Build ID. As I learned from Paul Webster in Bug 300260 you can use the following to put this build ID into the cli...
Browser Tales - Java to JavaScript and vice versa with the SWT Browser Widget
The SWT Browser widget makes it very easy to run HTML and JavaScript within Eclipse. This widget encapsulates a browser (system dependent) into a SWT widget.
Re-using the Eclipse proxy preference settings in your Eclipse RCP application
The following demonstrates how to re-use the Eclipse proxy preferences in an Eclipse RCP application.
Eclipse RCP - Removing the minimize and maximize buttons from Views
I got the question how someone could remove the maximize and minimize buttons from a view in an Eclipse RCP application.
JavaScript in the SWT Browser widget
At the Eclipse Summit Europe I listened to a talk of Boris Bokowski about Eclipse and the Web.
API for reading Eclipse plugin dependencies
The Eclipse platform provides an API to allows that you can access in information of the MANIFEST.MF. For example you could read the dependencies of your plu...
SWT - Putting a file into the clipboard
I recently got the question how you can put a file into the system clipboard.
Reflections on Predictably Irrational
I recently read the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. I really enjoyed his insights into motivation and personal judgement of values. If you don’t h...
Eclipse e4 - Using the modeled user interface editor
Update This description has been updated in the following tutorial: Eclipse e4 tutorial.
Eclipse Activities - Hide / Display certain UI elements
Eclipse Activities can be used to hide / display certain UI elements, for example based on the role of the user. The related extension point is “org.eclipse....
Eclipse RCP / Plug-in - Reading an icon out of the icon directory of the plug-in
If you want to access an icon from your /icons directory in your code you can access it via the following method:
Conditional Breakpoints in Eclipse
Eclipse allows to setup conditional breakpoints. Very nice feature. You can use Java coding (with content assistent) to program the condition
Deploying a Eclipse product if the Eclipse application is in another plug-in
Today I learned from Bug 237893 that I have to add the dependency of plugin.xml to build.properties manually to the plugin.xml. Otherwise you can not export...
Passing parameters to Eclipse RCP via the command line
It is easy to pass parameters via the command line to an Eclipse RCP application. For example the following checks the command line arguments for the dbconn...
Eclipse Buddys - Flexible
Assume the situation there you have a plug-in Master which will use classes which can come from plug-in A or plug-in B then. At runtime you have either A or ...
My first code contribution to Eclipse
I have my first code in an official Eclipse project. The project is the XSLT project which is part of Eclipes WTP