Monday, May 12, 2008

Feed your Buckminster

Did you know that Buckminster can deliver RSS feeds and links that appear in the Eclipse UI?

We wanted to make it possible to share content that relates to a component, such as a links to wiki, bugzilla, and documentation, and to RSS feeds like a version feed, open and closed issues in bugzilla, examples feed, why not a "checkin feed", or why not a feed with the lastest available plugins...

We selected the OPML 2.0 XML definition for Outline Processing - essentially describing a structure of links and feeds - or bookmarks if you like. And we decided to include this into the Buckminster model. This means that a component type can auto generate meta data from components that have extra "community" information and make this available in the form of OPML. Buckminster recognizes that a component can have an OPML file embedded in the component (by default it is called buckminster.opml and is placed in the root of the component, but it is possible to have it in some other directory and give it a different name by setting properties).

Buckminster includes two new views that makes use of the new OPML feature, a Component Explorer that shows all components known to Buckminster, and a Component Outline that follows the current selection showing the related component information.

Here is a screenshot of the Component Outline, which also shows Buckminster's integration with the RSS Owl Reader.


200805122051.jpg

If you want to try out the RSS OWL integration - there is a preview available at our update site http://dev.cloudsmith.com/updates3_4 - it is based on RSS OWL 2.0 M7 but with some patches applied.

And here is a screenshot of RSS OWL showing the example feed:


rssowlbuckyexample1

Clicking on the links in RSS OWL will start buckminster materialization, or open the cquery editor!

1 comment:

Benjamin Pasero said...

That's great! We will work hard to bring the Eclipse-SDK version of RSSOwl 2 back in sync with our latest milestone so that you can benefit from the latest features.

Ben