Ok, it’s getting tough. Only 9 days left before EclipseCon officially starts. All contributors and committers around me are already swarming around to get the demos and presentations ready – besides fixing bugs for the upcoming M6 build. But why is everybody so excited about EclipseCon? I think the numerous talks are only one side of the coin. Personally the way more interesting part is the come-together of all people you know from bug reports, mailing lists and newsgroups. While it is nice to see each other, it often brings up great discussions about Eclipse technology – especially interesting for me: RAP and E4.

The number of BoFs this year is tremendous. If you’re developing RAP applications or planning to use RAP in the near future, you should definitly visit me and the rest of the team at the RAP BoF. As this is the first BoF for the RAP project we’re really excited to see who’s coming. If you’re planning to attend, why don’t you just add some of your ideas to the list of discussion topics? The intention of BoFs is that you have the chance to talk directly with the RAP committers and give the team the chance to see your standpoints. Take the chance to poke us for all the bugs we didn’t fix yet Or if you’re interested to see any of the long-standing feature requests to be added to the plan – no problem (at least if you have enough beer for the team)! We’re looking forward to some lively discussions – not just as part of the BoF!

Tags: bof, e4, eclipsecon, rap

For those of us in Canada, it can be hard to think about summer.  Even in Victoria we had a late blast of winter, which makes it feel like summer will never come.  However, for open source developers, summer is just around the corner — Summer of Code that is. The Google Summer of Code program provides funds and the infrastructure to enable students to work on open source software from May to August.  This is the 5th year Google is putting on this program and they just opened up the the application for member organizations.  Once again, Eclipse will be applying for participation.

I have been contacted by a number of students with some great ideas, including Fabian Steeg, who wants to bring Graphviz’s DOT language to Zest.  This is a great idea, and will hopefully open the door to end user graph based customization within Eclipse.  

While the student application process has not formally started, I would encourage students to start thinking and preparing their ideas.  As a former student, here are a few tips:

1. Blog — Write about your ideas and get some early feedback
2. Subscribe to the Eclipse SoC mailing list and the Google Summer of Code Group
3. Blog — Write about your experiences with Eclipse, let people know just how passionate your are about the technologies
4. Get involved with the Eclipse projects now — Subscribe to the developer mailing lists, get a bugzilla account, help triage bugs, review the news groups — Generally help out and let people know who you are
5. Blog — Have I mentioned this yet?  If you have an Eclipse blog with some content considering adding yourself to planet eclipse.
6. Add your proposal idea to the SoC Wiki page

 I imagine Google Summer of Code will be very competitive this year, so getting an early start will give you a competitive advantage .  Honestly, the participating in the Google Summer of Code program was one of the best decisions I made.

Tags: soc

Are you using RAP and attending EclipseCon?

First, as a RAP committer I would love to hear from you. Tell / show me what you built, what you liked, what was difficult. You can catch us in the sessions below, the RAP BOF or the EclipseSource booth.

Second, here’s an overview of all RAP-related sessions at the conference.

Monday

• Tutorial: “Single Sourcing RCP and RAP” – Desktop and web clients from a single code base  - Ralf Sternberg & Ruediger Herrmann, 8:00 – 12:00, Grand Ballroom C

Tuesday

• Automated tests for RAP applications – Benjamin Muskalla, 11:30 – 12:00, Room 209/210
• RAP or GWT: Which Java-Based AJAX Technology Is For You?, Dan Rubel & Mark Russell (Instantiations), 14:30 – 15:20, Great America Meeting Room 3
• e4 on RAP and SWT Browser Edition – Jochen Krause, 16:30 – 17:00, Room 209/210
• RAP BoF - Ruediger Herrmann, 20:45 – 22:00, Room 207

Wednesday

• Single Sourcing: Extend your RCP Application to the Web with RAP – Ralf Sternberg & Ruediger Herrmann, 10:10 – 11:00, Room 206
• Integrating BIRT in RAP applications – Benjamin Muskalla, 13:55 – 14:20, Room 209/210
• Styling RAP Applications – Ralf Sternberg, 17:10 – 17:20, Room 209/210

Thursday

• Using the Usage Data Collector in RAP and RCP Applications – Markus Knauer, 11:30 – 11:40, Grand Ballroom F
• MAT – Single Sourcing in practice – Benjamin Muskalla, 11:40 – 11:50, Grand Ballroom F

Missed one? Leave a comment.

See you at EclipseCon,
Elias.

Tags: eclipsecon, events, rap, talks

EclipseCon is quickly approaching, I know this because I’m running out of dates to schedule my Mylyn “Do EclipseCon Prep” task.  But even with all the work remaining, I’m very excited about this years program.   I have been going over the schedule, looking for talks and tutorials I really want to attend.  Here is where you are likely to find me.

On Sunday evening you will find me at the tweetup / blogger BoF.  This traditionally takes place in the bar and is always one of the highlights of EclipseCon.

On Monday morning, I’m torn between the RAP Tutorial and John Arthorne’s “Deep Dive into the Platform Resource Model“.  In the afternoon, “Distributed OSGi — The ECF Way” looks awesome, however, I will be helping to deliver the p2 tutorial at that time.

On Tuesday, after breakfast and the keynote, I will be attending the main stage “Runtime (r)evolution at Eclipse“.  After this, I will likely be running around between a bunch of talks. In particular, I am really excited about “OSGi Short Takes“, “e4 Project in Review“, “e4 Under the Covers“, “I Declare!“, “e4 UI in Practice” and “EMF Repository Workflows”

On Wednesday morning I will likely be hiding as a I prepare my talk on Zest which is happening during the “UI Component Showcase“. This likely means I can’t attend “OSGi for Eclipse Devleopers” , another promising session.  ”PDE State of the Union” and “Higher-level UI Programming” both really interest me, and sadly I will be forced to choose. The rest of the afternoon will likely consist of me bouncing between “Web to Desktop, desktop to web“, “The Modeled UI in Eclipse e4“, “What’s new in p2“, and of course “The Unbearable Stupidity of Modeling“.

On Thursday, Kevin and Tim’s keynote, “Darwin Among the IDEs“, is one of the most anticipated in my book.  Both of these gentlemen have an incredible resume when it comes to IDEs.  After this, I will likely head to the “Ask the AC (Panel)“, where I’m sure these fine men will be pressed on a number of issues related to Eclipse Architecture, project leadership and open source in general.  Before heading to the airport, I will try to catch a few more talks. In particular I will try to attend “Bringing GEF to the Web“, “Text 2 Models and Back Again” and the Martin’s talk on Teno and EclipseLink.

WOW!    Include BoFs, receptions and the early morning exercise, and this is going to be one packed week.  Looking over my schedule, I seemto gravatate towards talks on e4, modeling, UI development and OSGi.

What about you, what are you intersted in?  And if you haven’t registered for EclipseCon, why not? You can save $200 if you register before March 20th.

Tags: eclipsecon

As indicated in my last posting on RFC 119 and ECF, Equinox and the runtime project now have a full implementation of RFC 119.

I was remiss, however, in not saying previously that we were fortunate to get a contribution for SLP-based discovery from Siemens.   This contribution is going through the Eclipse Foundation IP-process now, and will be part of the ECF 3.0/Galileo release.

Thanks specifically to Thomas Kiesslich, Philip Konradi, and Viktor Ransmayr for the contribution, as well as others at Siemens.  We’re thrilled to have you on the team!

Were you ever curious how to get those pretty colored labels in your JFace viewers you see all over Eclipse? For example, the blue counter label in the search results view:

Well, I’ll tell you how! Let’s start with famous RCP Mail example:

Let’s look at the current label provider in the RCP Mail example:

class ViewLabelProvider extends LabelProvider {

     public String getText(Object obj) {
          return obj.toString();
     }

     public Image getImage(Object obj) {
          String imageKey = ISharedImages.IMG_OBJ_ELEMENT;
          if (obj instanceof TreeParent)
               imageKey = ISharedImages.IMG_OBJ_FOLDER;
          return PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getSharedImages().getImage(imageKey);
     }
}

Pretty basic right? Well, to get styled labels all we need to do is extend StyledCellLabelProvider (available since Eclipse 3.4):

class ViewLabelProvider extends StyledCellLabelProvider {
     public void update(ViewerCell cell) {
          Object obj = cell.getElement();
          StyledString styledString = new StyledString(obj.toString());

          if(obj instanceof TreeParent) {
               TreeParent parent = (TreeParent) obj;
               styledString.append(" (" +
                    parent.getChildren().length +
                    ")", StyledString.COUNTER_STYLER);
          }

         cell.setText(styledString.toString());
         cell.setStyleRanges(styledString.getStyleRanges());
         cell.setImage(getImage(obj));
         super.update(cell);
     }

     public Image getImage(Object obj) {
          String imageKey = ISharedImages.IMG_OBJ_ELEMENT;
          if (obj instanceof TreeParent)
               imageKey = ISharedImages.IMG_OBJ_FOLDER;
          return PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getSharedImages().getImage(imageKey);
     }
}

If you do that, the RCP Mail example will look like this now:

This just scratches the surface of what is possible with owner draw, styled strings and styled label providers.

Hope this helps and happy styling!

Tags: eclipse, jface, tips

Did you notice that two out of the three finalists for the Eclipse Community Awards in the category “Best Commercial Equinox Applications” are based on RAP? One is a web-based customer relationship management system called PIA, a SaaS application for small and medium businesses.

CAS PIA

The other is Yoxos Enterprise, a single solution for IT departments and development teams to share custom Eclipse-based tool-sets, configurations and source code.

Yoxos Enterprise.

It’s great to see successful applications built on RAP! Do you know of any others out there?

Tags: eclipse, rap

I spent a good portion of my day today working on one of my EclipseCon 2009 presentations that I’ll be giving with Bernd Kolb and Martin Lippert, “OSGi for Eclipse Developers“:

It should be a fun talk because all of us are experienced Eclipse guys with in depth OSGi knowledge. We all have our own horror stories about working with Eclipse developers in the field and introducing them to the more exotic parts of OSGi.

We plan to cover these topics:

• Import-Package vs. Require-Bundle
• Dynamic Bundles
• Extensions vs. Services
• Compendium Services
• OSGi Tooling in Eclipse

Do you have any particular ideas about a topic you want to hear about? We’re open to suggestions as we finish up the talk for EclipseCon!

Tags: eclipse, OSGi

I’ve blogged previously about what we (ECF) are doing WRT to RFC 119 (Distributed OSGi Services):  RFC 119 and ECF – part 2

The news for today…I’m rather excited to report…is that we now have a working implementation of RFC 119, with support for both discovery and distribution parts of the specification.  This will be part of the ECF 3.0/Galileo release, and of course we will be talking about it in Markus’ and my tutorial, as well as some other talks.

What’s So Cool About Yet Another Spec Implementation?

In my view, what makes this implementation interesting and useful is that we’ve used the abstract ECF discovery and remote services APIs to implement this spec, meaning that without doing any other work, RFC compliant distributed OSGi services are supported using the following transports

Distribution

• r-OSGi (http)
• XMPP
• ECF Generic
• Skype
• Java Messaging Service (JMS)
• JavaGroups

Discovery

• Service Location Protocol (RFC 2608)
• Bonjour/Zeroconf/DNS-SD

And, of course any other transports that people are willing to create, as the ECF remote services API is completely open.

Our desire/hope is that others will implement ECF providers built from other protocols/transports of their choosing (both commercial and open source)…with the payoff to them being that they will then automagically have a RFC 119-compliant implementation…since all ECF providers are now RFC 119 compliant (and will remain so, as we will update the impl as the spec changes).  All the existing implementations done by the ECF team (e.g. r-OSGi, ECF generic, etc) are open source and so may be used/reused to create new providers as desired.

Another thing that I think is cool is that even though RFC 119 specifies using transparent proxies for accessing remote OSGi services, it allows (and even encourages) implementations to support non-transparent/asynchronous remoting (i.e. using one-ways, asynchronous rpc, and futures).  ECF’s remote services API already has support for futures, and asynchronous/non-blocking remote invocation via its IRemoteService interface.

With our current impl of RFC 119, clients can access the IRemoteService instance (in addition to or instead of the proxy), via a standard service property on the ServiceReference.  This gives clients a runtime choice of whether to access a remoted service via a proxy…or via asynchronous/non-blocking techniques like futures and one-ways.

One final thing…the size cost for the ECF remote services API is fairly small (<60k of code) next to the size of the implementations…making it possible to use in smaller (as well as larger) execution environments.

Tags: api, discovery, distribution, ecf, equinox, rfc119

As I mentioned previously, Wayne Beaton from the Eclipse Foundation paid a visit to Victoria this week. Wayne is currently on a west-coast road trip visiting a number of schools out here. I had a chance to catch up with Wayne as he stopped by both the University of Victoria, and the Vancouver Island Java User Group.

At UVic, Del Myers (a master’s student) showed off his Sequence Viewer widget.  Del has captured the notion of sequence viewer as an SWT widget (with JFace adapters).   Del is thinking of opening up the viewer, and possibly bringing it to Eclipse through Summer of Code.  

I also saw Wayne at the Vancouver Island Java User Group where he gave some demos of Mylyn, Eclipse plug-in development, RCP, RAP and eRCP.  

From what I could tell, people were excited and many didn’t realize just how powerful the Eclipse Run-Time is.  If anyone on the west coast is interested it talking Eclipse, just ping.  And if you are looking for more information about OSGi and RCP, checkout the Eclipse Training Series.