If you haven’t seen it in the Eclipse announcements: Galileo SR2 is available for download from eclipse.org. From this page you can download the new EPP packages that are based on Galileo SR2 (Service Release) and Eclipse 3.5.2.

Or, if you don’t want to download the full packages, you can start an upgrade – that’s what I did just a few minutes ago. I started with an older working copy of Eclipse (probably something from Galileo SR1) and started the upgrade process (‘Help’ > ‘Check for Update’).

It takes a while until p2 fetches all the required metadata from several repositories. The list includes the EPP package repository with the package definitions, the main Galileo repository and the Eclipse Platform repository. A few Okay-clicks later, p2 started to download the new content and asked me some more minutes later to restart Eclipse. Et voilà – after that restart I had a brand-new Eclipse with the latest version without downloading a new package.

Tags: eclipse, galileo, new and noteworthy, p2, SR2

As a reminder, OSGi DevCon London happens tomorrow, February 23rd. If you want to learn about OSGi from the experts and live in the area, I highly recommend you visit.

I’m personally excited about Kirk Knoernschild’s keynote about OSGi in the Enterprise: Agility, Modularity and Architecture’s Paradox. You can view the full program here.

I will be speaking about Eclipse, OSGi and API Evolution and also will be participating in the spicy OSGi Development Tooling Panel. As always, if you want to chat about Eclipse, OSGi or open source over frosty beverages… feel free to find me.

If you want to follow via Twitter, there are two tags you should pay attention to: #jaxlondon and #osgidclon

Tags: OSGi

I’ve spend the last few days adjusting the Ridget layer in Riena, to make it work with Eclipse RAP and Eclipse RCP. We call this process “single-sourcing” (EclipseCon tutorial).

Ridgets wrap around standard SWT / RWT controls to provide additional functionality and a better API. One example that you can see below: Ridgets have “markers”, which tag a control as mandatory, wrong or read-only and change the control’s behavior accordingly.

It’s worth mentioning that all three screenshots run from the same code. The only difference is the target environment used (RAP or RCP).

Ridgets styled with RAP's "business" theme

Ridgets styled with RAP's "classic" theme

Ridgets in a regular RCP application

Once this work is completed the Ridget API will be usable for RAP applications as well.

To stay informed about this effort:

• CC yourself to Bug 302893, and
• come to our EclipseCon talk “Riena 2.0 - New & Noteworthy“

Tags: eclipsecon, rap, riena

Finally! Moments ago I received my personal copy of the new OSGi and Equinox book!

More than a year in the making it is very gratifying to finally have the physical book. The cover looks great and the production team did a good job of the layout.

To celebrate I updated the book website a bit to have forums and a few other things. More will come in the next few days including a teaser chapter and the table of contents. Some people have asked for the samples in a zip file so we’ll put that together as well.  Stay tuned.

Of course, if you just can’t wait and want to get the book now, you can
buy it now. Note that Amazon thinks that it is still coming but I’m assured that it is indeed in-stock so ordering now will get it to you shortly. Enjoy.

Finally, for those of you taking a wait and see approach, we are planning to give a few away at our EclipseCon tutorial…  The tutorial will use material from the book giving you a great opportunity to get a quick start and then dive deep and explore more by reading the book afterwards.  See you there.

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate

In the last few weeks i was confronted with several projects and developers, who were trying to incorporate the scrum process into their project environment. The following remarks will pinpoint some of the problems and challenges several of the projects had and what a possible solution might look like (your mileage may vary).

Upfront i have to say, that i am a strong believer in scrum and its gains. This opinion originates from the fact, that i have worked in scrum projects which turned out very well. Why did they work well? Because they applied scrum!

The Fundamentals

We all know the sentence “yeah, we are an agile team”. And next they present you their fixed road map with milestones etc. The opposite is the “no planning agility”. We just fiddle along on a daily basis. That is not agile either.

I think the sweetspot is where scrum enters the stage. The product backlog dictates your workload and the sprint backlog defines your daily work. What’s the gain? Transparency and flexibility. The two virtuoso every one wants, most people claim and the fewest projects actually have. Lets see what these two words actually mean.

Transparency - Like a glass window transparency has two sides. When looking at the team we want to know what the team is actually working on and what their progress state is. The scrum wall with its small tasks and the sprint burndown is the place to find these information. When looking at the product owner, it is his job to provide a well formed backlog. Well formed means stories with clear scope and manageable volume. From both perspectives you have the ability to intervene when necessary.

Flexibility - Flexibility allows to refocus the course of the development efforts while being way under way. Only after you have finished the current sprint you plan the next one with the stories you need the most. After your project time has elapsed you can be certain that everything that is in your project right now is what you really need. No extras. Just the right features. Admittedly we could miss a few features but that would simply require more man power or more time. Most importantly: the scope is spot on because of constant corrections of the project plan.

So that is great theory. Now on to the problems…

Oh wait. This blog post is getting to long and i have to many points on my list. So lets take a break here and discuss the above until part II is ready.

Are you applying scrum? What are the biggest gains for you?

Tags: Agile, Scrum

We recently had a workshop on redView with the developers of the project, probably many of you know ekke. We wanted to evaluate it and gain a better understanding if we could use it in the context of a project in the insurance space.

redView looks pretty promising, and although personally I am not a big fan of modeling and code generation there might be a sweet spot for redView for people who have tons of forms to fill in data.

One really nice thing about redView is that they created a detailled install instruction (a yoxos profile could probably help here), and a bunch of demos to get started.

http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/examples
http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/installation/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redview/files/

P.S: The obligatory question about single sourcing redView has been discussed, and as redView is EMF + Riena it looks feasible to get redViews working in RAP. Even the visual form designer imposes no hurdles that could not be overcome (plain SWT, no GEF).

Tags: modeling, rap, rcp, riena

Traditionally the Eclipse community has used the mailing lists, newsgroups and an aggregation of blogs to stay connected.  Mailing lists and newsgroups have generally been more technical, while the blog-o-sphere has everything from tutorials to highly opinionated views.  Over the past year and a half, many of those in the Eclipse Community have also emerged on Twitter.

We have used twitter for Bug reporting, bug triaging, blowing off steam, tracking down committers — and we even organized our Movember team through the social medium.  Twitter takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it can be a valuable way to stay connected.  I’ve been using twitter for about a year now.  Here are a few tips if you’re just getting started:

1. Post some content before you start following people. You can post the typical: I’m just figuring out twitter. But follow it up with a few interesting posts — ideally about something you care about.
2. Follow your friends first.  It’s good to follow some people who will follow you back… Once you get some people listening, others will follow you too.
3. Get a good twitter client. I personally like http://brizzly.com/. I hear there are very good clients for the Mac.
4. Follow people (and topics) that you find interesting.  In the Eclipse ecosystem, there is a lot of activity on twitter.
5. Once on, Re-tweet and Reply to things you find interesting…. i.e. Join the conversation

If you’re interested in Eclipse and are looking for people to follow, check our twitter wiki page, or look at wefollow.com.

Peter Friese also has a great post on why he uses Twitter.  I really like his suggestion Don’t protected your posts.  If you’re worried about privacy, just be mindful of what you write!

Note: Yesterday Google announced ‘Google Buzz‘, which some are calling ‘What Twitter Should Be’.  While Buzz may take down twitter, likely it just means one more stop in my daily commute (E-mail, twitter, blogs… now buzz).

Tags: twitter

As I mentioned a while back, Eclipse Helios M5 was made available for Download. There are number of New and Noteworthy features, but one really big feature was omitted from the N&N. The Eclipse provisioning platform, p2, finally has API! Really, go take a look at the code… all those internal.provisional packages are now gone!  This was actually a huge milestone for the p2 team, and Pascal did a great job steering us towards the API.

What does this mean to you? Well, if you are building anything on top of p2 you should grab M5 and see how the new API feels. We are going to be pushing hard to finalize the API for M6, so if there is anything missing, speak up now.

John Arthorne even started a Migration guide: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox/p2/Helios_Migration_Guide

Tags: helios, p2

Let’s assume for the moment, that in an alternate reality I can travel back in time to 2008. Once there, I meet a bright bunch of people that work on something called e5 (executive summary.odp). My summary:

“the runtime platform that is simple and appealing to _____ application developers”

Here’s what I would say to them:

e5 should take risks

When I became interested in Eclipse it was cool and disruptive. A real game changer. It is now the established tooling platform and understandably locked into perpetual refinement mode (Entrenched Player’s Dilemma). Make sure that e5 is equally game changing. Otherwise we are setting ourselves up to be disrupted.

At the EclipseCon 2008 we committed a “strategic sin”. We agreed that e4 would be compatible with 3.x. This limited the potential for e4 by forcing it to be something that is “in the box” vs. “outside the box”.

(taken from Death by risk-aversion by Kathy Sierra)

For e5 to be successful it needs to take risks. I don’t think that we need a better tooling platform. We already have a very good one with 3.x. And it’s still improving and not going away. Instead we need a runtime that provides something unique and remarkable. It must kick-ass in a new way.

e5 needs a driver

If you try to be everything to everybody, you will at best be mediocre at everything. e5 should be laser focused on being the best runtime for ___________ developers.

People tend to avoid specialization. It is perceived as a risk. However, if you ask a marketing person he / she will tell you that specialization is good. It’s your way to get noticed. It’s your foot in the door. You build a niche, become unbeatable and expand. Eclipse 3.x first became the tooling platform of choice, then client platform of choice for Java devs, then the modeling technology of choice for Java devs.

Unfortunately e4 lacks a driver that would help it specialize and focus. A driver, like the JDT was for the Platform. As far as I know, there is no major product build on top of e4. I believe that the current e4 (Feb 2010) is not yet appealing enough for web development or client development. It will not lure web-side Java developers away from Spring / J2EE / GWT. Or client-side Java developers away from RCP. Or Javascript folks away from jQuery / Prototype / Dojo. Or Rubyists away from Rails.

It is hard to pick the right driver. I don’t want to attempt providing an answer and limit your thinking. But feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

e5 must be easy to learn & master

If you believe Eclipse 3.x is easy to get into, attend a beginner’s training. You will see how experienced Java developers struggle with the learning curve. And it’s not becoming easier with e4.

That is a problem, because it limits the mass appeal of Eclipse as a runtime solution. If you think it is a popular runtime, go to a Java User Group and see how few of the people who use Eclipse have written a plug-in for it.

It is in our human nature, that we tend to take the path that has the least resistance (read: easy) not the path that offers the most rewards (read: complex technology).

For e5 to be broadly successful it must kick-ass AND be easy to learn & master.

Looking forward to your comments,
Elias.

Tags: e4

The RAP team just announced the availability of RAP 1.3 M5!

If you’re interested in single-sourcing Eclipse-based applications, please give it a try.

In the 1.3 M5 release, the RAP team added more SWT API to make single sourcing existing applications easier:

• Composite#layout( Control[], int )
• MouseEvent#stateMask
• Widget#reskin( int ) and SWT.Skin event
• ImageData
• ImageLoader
• ImageLoaderEvent

The team also added IApplication support which simply translates into one less extension point you have to use to create a RAP application. In the past, RAP had its own entrypoint extension point which performed a similar role to what the application support does in Equinox already.  This should make RAP even easier for RCP developers to get into.

RAP is also taking advantage of the Equinox extension registry is able to handle multiple locales.

So please give RAP a try if you’re interested in bringing your RCP application to the web.

Tags: rap