This is the final reminder for the Eclipse Vienna DemoCamp tomorrow.

I’m excited as this is my first Vienna Eclipse DemoCamp

There’s a great list of presentations and speakers:

• Werner Keil, Creative Arts & Technologies, “Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler“
• Lixto Team, Lixto Software GmbH, “Eclipse-related aspects in Lixto Visual Developer“
• Christoph Mayerhofer, INSO, “ReviewClipse – Continuous Code-Reviews within the Eclipse IDE”
• Chris Aniszczyk and Jeff McAffer, EclipseSource, “Introduction to EclipseRT and Toast“
• Tom Schindl, BestSolution.at, “E4 – A short overview”
• Robert Handschmann, Sphinx IT Consulting, “MDSD with Serapis using Eclipse Plugins”
• Maximilian Weißböck, The Business Kitchen – “Speed up your development with Eclipse and Xtext”
• Karl Hönninger, s-IT Solutions GmbH, “openXMA DSL” openXMA – Integrated presentation layer modelling
• Florian Pirchner, “Riena-EMF-Dynamic-Views (redview)”
• Philip Langer, Business Informatics Group, TU Wien, “The Operation Recorder: Specifying “Model Refactorings By-Example”
• Michael Clay, codeworkz.at, “Xtext“

There are currently over 80 people registered; if you’re in the area, please register and swing by!

Hope to see everyone there.

Tags: democamp, vienna

Over the past few days I have spoken to many different groups at the EclipseRT days, various democamps and some students in one of our Advanced RCP courses. Each time people have asked…

“when is the OSGi and Equinox book coming out?”

Most were hopeful, some were trying to get a rise out of me. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

I am very pleased to say that the full, pre-copy-edited content is available on Rough Cuts. There are a few minor differences between what is online and what will end up in print but that is mostly a bit of grammar and a few technical fixes. The early versions of all the code is available though there are a few known issues in the packaging that we are still working on.

I am really very happy with how the book has turned out.  The structure has lots of content for everyone.  Tutorials, deep-dives, reference material. As you can see by the table of contents below, we start with some history, context and concepts. Then there is a set of tutorial chapters where we build up an example fleet management application called Toast to have a funky embedded vehicle user interface with Google Earth integration, client0server connectivity as well as a back-end control center for managing the fleet.

The Toast system from Chapter 14, the final tutorial chapter, has been donated to Eclipse as the Toast Examples project where is has been extended to have a RAP UI for the backend, EMF and EclipseLink for data management, ECF for infrastructure bits, etc etc.

The tutorial is followed by a number of deep-dives on key topics such as Declarative Services, the HTTP service, Remote Services (RFC119) and more.  Finally there are a set of reference chapters that go even deeper and look at the grotty issues of classloading, dynamic behavior and third party code libraries. It’s a good range of the popular OSGi concepts and services. Of course, there is always room for more in a 2nd edition! (can’t believe I said that…)

Part I:   Introduction
1              OSGi and Equinox
2              Concepts

Part II :  Tutorial
3              Tutorial Introduction
4              Hello Toast
5              Services
6              Dynamic Services
7              Client/Server Interaction
8             Testing
9              Packaging
10           Pluggable Services
11            Extensible User Interfaces
12            Dynamic Configuration
13            Web Portal
14            System Deployment with p2

Part III: Deep Dives
15            Declarative Services
16            Extensions
17            Logging
18           HTTP Support
19            Server Side
20           Release Engineering

Part IV: Reference
21            Dynamic Best Practices
22           Integrating Code Libraries
23           Advanced Topics
24           Declarative Services Reference

Now for finishing up the 2nd edition of the RCP book.  Chris and I are together this week and will be plugging away at the final tweaks before the copy-editing phase. The first 13 chapters of that book have gone to the copy editors and are available on Rough Cuts.

Tags: book, eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi, p2, rap, syndicate

Support for drag and drop just made it into the RAP source code repository. You can use the same API as known from SWT and thus re-use even more code when single-sourcing RCP applications.
It will be available in the M4 build. In the meanwhile you can check out the sources from CVS and explore the new functionality online (go to the List page).



There are still some things left to do, for more details see this bug. We would be very happy to gain feedback about how your existing drag and drop code works on RAP. In case something doesn’t work as expected, please drop us a line or open a bug.

Tags: eclipse, rap, Single Sourcing, swt

I recently added Del Myers to the PlanetEclipse syndication rolls.

Congratulations, you are number 275!

So don’t be shy…

…and file a bug against the PlanetEclipse administrators to have your blog added.

Tags: eclipse

We Riena committers smoothly shipped a fresh Riena Milestone last Friday, this time 1.2.0.M3 (download). Here’s the New & Noteworthy and the list of resolved items.

For the curious, here is the schedule leading towards the December release:

• 12/04 – 1.2.0 RC1
• 12/11 – 1.2.0 RC2
• 12/15 – 1.2.0

After that the work will start concentrating on the summer release, which is part of the Helios release train.

Tags: helios, milestone, riena

As an Eclipse committer, I love to see Eclipse technology used in a variety of places.

Last week, at the EclipseRT Day in Austin, Austin Riddle and Cole Markham from the Texas Center of Applied Technology gave a presentation on how EclipseRT technology is used in emergency management and threat simulation scenarios.

They get bonus points for a Movember reference in their slides.

They also had the coolest Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) usage I have ever seen.

Cover flow widgets, sweet!

Cool huh? Feel free to browse the slides.

I encourage anyone else in the community that is working on cool stuff using Eclipse technology to tell your story if you can.

Tags: eclipseRT, OSGi, rap

I’m not sure if people noticed this last week, but there’s been discussion of providing a simplified p2 ui by refactoring out the Mylyn discovery user interface and pushing it down the stack.

Mik Kersten alluded to this in his blog entry last week, where having a simple discovery and install mechanism can help grow an ecosystem. I think this enhancement would alleviate a common problem RCP developers have when it comes to providing a simpler user interface for their users. p2 does a great job in offering you a set of APIs to do many things, but in most cases… the operations and user interface should be simple.

If you’re interested, please provide feedback on this bug.

Tags: equinox, p2

We’re all looking forward to talk about EclipseRT, Equinox and RAP at the DemoCamps around the world. In case you want to catch us and talk about Eclipse and related topics, just join one of the DemoCamps near you. Besides many other interesting talks, we’ll mostly cover EclipseRT, RAP and p2.

Ottawa, ON, Canada – November 24 – Jeff McAffer (EclipseRT)
Braunschweig/Hanover, Germany – November 25 – Benjamin Muskalla (RAP)
Stuttgart, Germany – November 26 – Jordi Boehme Lopez (p2)
Kaiserslautern, Germany – November 26 – Holger Staudacher (RAP)
Frankfurt, Germany – November 26 – Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT,RAP)
Vienna, Austria – November 30 – Chris Anisczcyk and Jeff McAffer (RAP,EclipseRT)
Karlsruhe, Germany – December 3 – Markus Knauer, Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT)
Hamburg, Germany – December 4 – Jochen Krause (RAP)

I’m really looking forward to see you at the DemoCamps, as always it tends to be a lot of fun!

Tags: democamp, e4, eclipseRT, equinox, helios, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

We’ve reached the 20th of Movember and its time for a progress report from this Eclipse Mommitter.

• Shaved in the ‘stache earlier in the week
• Kids just could not stop laughing
• Wife would not look at me or kiss me
• After a week there has been some progress.
• The kids have finally stopped laughing (though now “pull the ‘stache is the game of the day)
• Wife will kiss me but still can’t really look at me

Here, judge for yourself.

Its a little strange to be out in public with the new look. I spent much of the week on the road for the EclipseRT days in Austin and Toronto.  Great events with lots of good people around.  I particularly enjoyed that there were ample breaks between sessions and lots of good conversations. And it turns out that the whole Movember thing is a good ice-breaker.  Even got a donation out of it! Valentin Baciu, another Mommitter of similar moustache design donated more to the cause.  Thanks! The Eclipse Mommitter team is up to $2200 now.  Pretty good effort but we could always use more donations.

Tags: movember, syndicate

A fan of OSGi?

A fan of all things enterprise?

Check this project proposal out at Eclipse…

This proposal recommends the creation of a new project called “Enterprise Modules”, nicknamed Gemini, to provide a home for subprojects that integrate existing Java enterprise technologies into module-based platforms, and/or that implement enterprise specifications on module-based platforms. Gemini will be a parent (“container project” as defined by the Eclipse Development Process) for several subprojects (“operating projects” as defined by the Eclipse Development Process) that provide the specific implementations/integrations. Gemini will itself be a subproject of the Eclipse Runtime Project and will strive to leverage functionality of existing projects. We encourage and request additional participation and input from any and all interested parties in the Eclipse community.

The future looks bright for EclipseRT and OSGi.

Tags: eclipseRT, OSGi