Today I ran into a problem which could easily solved using a short WMI query. The problem was that the query must be executed within a Java UI application. Googling for a solution I came only up with either quite some ugly workarounds (like generating a VBScript fragment, forking off the VBScript runtime and parsing the result) or some full blown COM/DCOM interfaces (like J-Integra or J-Interop). Although I really like J-Interop (we are using it for DCOM when accessing OPC server in OpenSCADA Utgard) it has some drawbacks. For J-Interop every access (even local access) is a network based access. Since J-Interop only supports DCOM it is free of any platform specific code but required the machine to be accessible using “remoting” functionality (DCOM). Since I wanted to query the WMI from a UI application and I am sure that the WMI query will stay on the Win32 version of the application I was not keen on adding “remoting” as a requirement to the UI application.

I just stumbled over a strange issue when installing an additional plugin into a fresh Eclipse installation:

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed<br></br>session context was:(profile=SDKProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).

No repository found containing: osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.team.cvs.ssh,3.2.100.I20090508-2000

I was unable to add any new plugin and searching Google for help was not successful. There was an issue somewhere in the Eclipse Bugzilla that the plugin org.eclipse.team.cvs.ssh was optional and no longer installed or required. Seems that P2 thinks the somewhat required for the installation process.

A possible workaround for the LTW issue that appeared in JBoss 6 using Spring 3 (SPR-7887) is to add an empty jboss-scanning.xml file to EAR and WAR files.

In my day to day work I encounter several interesting programming pattern that I don’t have a name for. Maybe you have?! So name the following pattern:

Today I tried to create a combo viewer in Eclipse with a different approach than the it seems the widgets was designed. I have an object which has to main properties an ID and a descriptive name. While this is nothing unusual following requirements seems to be: