Saturday, March 20, 2010

Quick test: GEF3D and e4 1.0 M4

Yesterday I posted my experiences of getting GEF3D running on e4 0.9. This is only a quick update for e4 1.0 M4. Remy Chi Jian Suen pointed me to e4 1.0 M4, and I followed the instruction on the Wiki page Remy linked to. Unfortunately, I did not succeed installing GMF with e4 1.0 M4 because there were always some unsatisfy dependencies errors. So I wasn't able to reproduce the NPE I described in the blog, and I wasn't able to test the Ecore Tools 3D example. I'm not personally using e4, so at the moment getting GEF3D running on e4 is not my first priority and I didn't investigate any further. Besides, I got a lot of exceptions in the e4 runtime, after restarting the runtime several times it didn't started at all. I get tons of "!MESSAGE unsupported:" messages, and when trying to create a new project with the context menu, the "new"-submenu is missing, finally I get another NPE:
java.lang.NullPointerException
 at org.eclipse.ui.internal.e4.compatibility.WorkbenchPage.getNewWizardShortcuts(WorkbenchPage.java:1172)
 at org.eclipse.ui.actions.BaseNewWizardMenu.addShortcuts(BaseNewWizardMenu.java:142)
 at org.eclipse.ui.actions.NewWizardMenu.addItems(NewWizardMenu.java:129)
 at org.eclipse.ui.actions.BaseNewWizardMenu.getContributionItems(BaseNewWizardMenu.java:205)
...
I don't know how but after switching the perspective I was able to create at least a simple project, and then the new-submenu was available enabling me to create a GEF3D graph example. So I got GEF3D to run with 1.0 M4 (proofed by screenshot ;-) ), however I found a severe problem with GEF 3.6 and I filed a bug report about that (# 306609). I had to fix that in order to get GEF3D running. Actually, this problem is a GEF3D blocker and I really hope the GEF team can solve that issue. As a matter of fact I'm glad to have found that bug now. I hope it's not too late for the final 3.6 version.
GEF3D on e4 1.0M4! Do you see the level-of-detail effect , i.e. labels on back planes are omitted! (Again kudos to Kristian ;-) )
Boris asked me to file a bug report, but frankly I don't know where to start... I could create a bug report about the NPE I described in my previous post, but I'd assume 0.9 is a little bit out-dated, isn't it?