Update your Eclipse .project file

I’ve just commited an updated Eclipse .project file to CVS. Every plugin and necessary libraries are now added to the project build settings. This way, doing refactoring in core, the changes will automatically propagate. Or at least, they are marked as bugs This was way to much work in the past.

Nevertheless, Columba will not use the class files compiled by Eclipse to load the plugins. Instead it will always use the plugin.jar. So, you have to run “ant plugins” and compile all of them to see the changes.

I really like this behaviour, but we could also change it. For example, always trying to load the class files from Columba’s classpath first would be an option.

Being platform independent or what?

Just read a user’s complain about Columba following Gnome User Interface Guidelines. These guidelines also dictact how to layout the menus. For example: the Preferences menuitem should always be the last item in the Edit menu. At least in Gnome. On Windows it should be better placed in Utilities.

I actually just saw that in Firefox. They change their menu based on the platform. So, they are more strictly following the platform they are just running on. Whereas we aim to provide the same experience for user’s on all platforms.

And my feeling is that we do right so. Many of our users choose Columba, because its written in Java, and because you can use it on every operating system and even reuse one single configuration folder. These users would be really upset, if the menu layout would change everytime they switch the platform.

Plugin resource loader issue fixed

I’ve just fixed the plugin resource loading bug. Loading of images or xml-files or whatsoever didn’t work.

Again, you have to specify your plugin resource folder in build.properties. Then to load the resource simply do a “this.getClass().getResourceAsStream(String resource)“.

I’ve had to change a couple of methods in core to make this work. All these methods didn’t use InputStream as the parameter to pass resource file content. Instead they used the path to the resource as String. This is wrong from an API user’s point of view, because the internal loader doesn’t know where these resources come from. You might even want to load resources from a webserver. So, simply using InputStream makes the API much more decoupled from the internal implementation.

Checking multiple IMAP folders for new messages

Enough people complained about this missing functionality! I’ve added it to our after 1.0 roadmap.

We will add a new dialog similar to the IMAP Subscribe Dialog to select the folders which should be checked automatically.

Still, we didn’t decide if this is going into core, or will be provided as optional plugin.

Plugins must specify src/ directory

Plugins now have to additionally specify all directories containing sourcecode. Same goes for resource files.

As always all changes have to be made in build.properties.

Building of all plugins can now be started by simply calling “ant plugins“.

ClientJava.com Columba interview

Read the news item.