Multithreaded Divide and Conquer

During my time as CS student the implementation of a divide and conquer algorithm was pretty straight forward:

  1. Take an amount of objects (usually an array and usually of type integer)
  2. Select a pivot element that splits the amount in half
  3. Do some computation with the two halves. E.g. for sorting make sure that all elements greater than the pivot are contained in one half and the rest in the other.
  4. Call the algorithm recursively for the two halves.

Since then one thing changed that make it possible to speed the computation up: Multiple CPU cores that allow for multi-threading.
„Multithreaded Divide and Conquer“ weiterlesen

Eclipse plug-in manifest

The Eclipse plug-in manifest is also known as OSGi Manifest(Although the page says OSGi bundle, some of the described features are specific for Eclipse). In an earlier article I already addressed some of these issues. With this one I want revisit those and describe some more features, that I found helpful in my daily work with plug-in development. „Eclipse plug-in manifest“ weiterlesen

Immutable Objects in a class hierarchy

I have a project that has data objects that are implemented as beans. These classes form the base of a whole class hierarchy. Reading Joshua Bloch’s book „Effective Java“ I recognised this as a bad architecture. I decided to combine different items from the book: immutable object, builders and components instead of class hierarchy.
„Immutable Objects in a class hierarchy“ weiterlesen

Combining Immutable Singleton and Builder

It is a good idea to use immutable objects where possible to reduce the amount of time you loose debugging because some value is not as expected and trying to find out where it has changed. It is also sensible to use a builder for some class with many members to be initialized at constructing time. It may even make sense to implement your object as a singleton. All these techniques are promoted by Joshua Blochs Effective Java. But can you combine these three items to work together?
„Combining Immutable Singleton and Builder“ weiterlesen

Adding context sensitive Help to your Plug-in

For my Code generation plug-in I wanted to add some context sensitive help. Looking for any hints I only found a quick description at Macrobug’s that dates back in autumn 2007 when Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) was the current platform. Following these steps I could not produce any meaningful results. Therefore I figured it out on my own and present my solution here for anyone interested.
„Adding context sensitive Help to your Plug-in“ weiterlesen