Bahn.de is awesome!

I've appreciated the clean bahn.de website and its complete and accurate railway itinerary creation ever since I first used it in 2003. The site continues to impress with additions of comparative travel charts like this one:

It's pretty cool to see how much less impact travel by rail will be compared to a car or airline.

While I'm sure more rigorous users have some complaints, the bahn.de service seems much more helpful in getting around Europe than anything else. I must also observe there are no such comprehensive travel solutions for planning a trip in the US. Then again, the only comparable options for transportation in the US are bus and airline – train travel is only possible in certain areas.

In Europe, reservations are only available from the national carriers, so only certain itineraries can be reserved from the Bahn.de website. On the other hand, since I'm traveling with a Eurail pass, it would be necessary for me to make the reservations in person anyway. (It would be nice if the Eurail pass could develop a website for pass holders to make reservations, but I'm sure that's more easily said than done.)

Eclipse update sites for XText incubation

I've been fumbling around a bit trying to get XText 0.7.2 working in my Eclipse 3.5 installations, so I thought it might be helpful to write down what I've found.

There are 3 update sites that were needed in order to complete the update today.

1. MWE SDK from EMFT→ http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emft/updates/releases/
2. The Xtext plugin from TMF→ http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/updates/
3. The Xtext ANTLR Support plugin (0.7.2) from Itemis→ http://download.itemis.com/updates/

The last is optional, though there are warnings that the capability is limited without ANTLR. It is omitted due to the requirement for EPL in Eclipse projects; ANTLR's current license prevents it from being offered from the Eclipse.org update sites. These all appear in the list of Eclipse update sites on ekkes-corner.

The Itemis update site provides a convenient collection of all the related modeling plugins. I turns out that my difficulty resulted from the fact that I didn't realize p2 (Eclipse Provisioning Platform) wasn't loading the current contents of the update site, so I started to search for update sites that had the 0.7.2 release of the plugins. What I learned is that I can get the current contents of the update sites by opening the Install/Update Preferences and invoking 'Test Connection' on each. Perhaps there's a better way...

Hopefully not too many others will encounter the difficulty I had finding the right versions, particularly for MWE.