RSE World

Lately I have been trying out Eclipse Monkey. The Dash project website describes Eclipse Monkey best: "Eclipse Monkey is a dynamic scripting tool for the automation of routine programming tasks. Monkey scripts are little JavaScript programs using either the Eclipse APIs or custom Monkey DOMs." This tool caught my eye as I always wanted to try out Greasemonkey for Firefox and it looked like it could do the same for Eclipse. Reading the wiki for creating scripts showed that it was very easy to do. Now I just needed an idea for a script.

Nick Boldt had an enhancement request to be able to have 2 Remote Systems Views open at once. Until this is added we came up with a workaround to use the Remote Scratchpad. You might be thinking Remote Scratchpad? It is one of the views that comes with RSE, but is hidden behind the Properties view. Its purpose is to be able to drag and drop any RSE object into it for later use. It's great for doing copy and paste across connections. So, if I can drag and drop any RSE object into it I can populate the view to be a secondary Remote Systems View.

With this bug in mind I decided to make a script that would copy all of my connections to the Scratchpad and display the Scratchpad view. The script can be found on bug #210574. If you want to try this out install Eclipse Monkey from the Europa update site and copy the contents of the file attached on bugzilla. Go to Scripts > Paste inside Eclipse. You have now installed your first RSE Eclipse Monkey script that will Clone the Remote Systems View inside the Remote Scratchpad.

During my time doing an internship at IBM I was able to learn and work on the Remote System Explorer. Now I can't work without it. Typically I would work on assignments at school during breaks and at home. This would cause me to have to move files back and forth. Then in the end I would have to put all of my files on my account at school and ssh in to submit my assignment. All this moving of files around and switching between tools was such a hassle.

This is where RSE comes in. I now no longer have to switch between tools. Submitting assignments is easy with an SSH Shell or using the Terminal. That removes the need from having putty or SecureCRT open. As you would think with the Remote System Explorer I wouldn't need another tool like CuteFTP to move files around. Why would I move files around though when we have the RSE EFS implementation. All I do is setup my Java Project and link to my files on my account at school. If I made changes at school and am going to start working at home all I have to do is refresh my project and everything will be updated and compiled.

The unfortunate reality is that if it wasn't for my internship at IBM I probably never would have found this amazing tool. I never would have looked in the Device Software Development Platform for a tool like this. My hope is that this blog will help others recognize how useful RSE is and give it a try.