While the upgrade from Eclipse 3.6.2 to 3.7 went without nearly any trouble the upgrade of the Acceleo plugins to the versions provided with Eclipse Indigo was “a little bit more” problematic.

Finally, we made it! openscada.org has been updated to look good and contain new information. Finally :)

Tooltips are a quick way to add information to a widget that received the user’s attention. While one can argue about the pros and cons of tooltips this post focuses on the style of tooltips once you decided to use them.

If you are working as a software developer in a project based development environment, you will, hopefully, encounter the day the customer wants to see the result that was promised to him. The worst thing that can happen is that after months of development, you finally end up in a scenario of it is not working or it is not what we need. Sure there are numerous reasons of why this happened and what types development process you could have used. But often quality management and software development definitions are written once and never lived as described. developers consider it a burden that is unnecessary and is blocking them in their daily task of creating new functionality.

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.