Doing live presentations is always challenging, isn’t it? Especially here, at EclipseCon, I like to integrate some demo elements in my talks, but in case you are relying on external resources, such as a network, there is always the chance that it is not going to work during your presentation. And that’s exactly what happened when we did our talk on Monday.

For those who couldn’t attend you can find the slides below, for those who were in the room, here is the URL to our distributed demo search application that is still running on the cloud:

cloudle.eclipse.org/search – server has been shut down

We asked the audience at the very beginning of the talk to give us a URL of a website. Then we used g-Eclipse with a small JMX-management extension that we implemented for this talk in order to configure the SMILA framework running on several cloud nodes. (If you don’t know what SMILA is: It is a framework for building search solutions, in our case it was the glue between our exemplary back-end Apache Solr and a small RAP-based search front-end.) The next step was to start the web crawler on this remote machine with g-Eclipse to give it some time to download the web pages below the given URL and to build up an index.

At that point in time I saw some network timeouts. Not a good sign but maybe only a temporary problem that goes away after some minutes, some minutes that we were using to explain what we did. See the slides yourself:

Our exemplary (and simplified) architecture has one front-end node that is running our little RAP search-UI, and several back-end nodes, each of them with a search index of its own and crawling a different set of URLs. At the end of the talk it was planned to make the remote machines known to each other and that means in this case that the front-end needs the addresses of the back-end nodes. Once again, we used g-Eclipse to add the other back-end nodes to its configuration.

Just for the records… it worked well when we tested it before the talk, and it worked immediately after it. Unfortunately we had some kind of weird network problems in our session.

Tags: aws, cloud, eclipsecon, equinox, p2, smila

Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, emf, helios, new and noteworthy, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

In days gone by the EclipseCon online program had ics calendar entries so you could just click and have a talk added to your calendar. The other day I was setting up my EclipseCon schedule (wow, hard decisions) and noticed that calendar entries were missing.  After a few iterations with Don and Gabe as we struggled with the vagaries of timezone support in ics files, we now have the calendar entry links back!  Check it out!  See the calendar icon on the right side?

Thanks Gabe and  Don for the fast turn-around on this very useful service.

Tags: eclipsecon

The new EPP packages for Helios M6 are uploaded to the download area and just need some more hours to be distributed to the Eclipse download mirrors until we can make them available for the public from eclipse.org/downloads. The mirroring is important, because otherwise the eclipse.org uplink would be entirely saturated and no one could get the Helios M6 bits in time before EclipseCon.

In the meantime, I’d like to highlight some additions that I recently did as a package maintainer of the RCP package. (If you don’t know what a package maintainer is you should consider joining my talk on Monday about ‘Building EPP packages‘.)

• git is becoming more and more popular at Eclipse and EGit is always one of the first plug-ins that I am installing whenever I unpack a new Eclipse milestone on my computer. The logical step: Include EGit in my RCP package because I think that I am not the only one who needs this tool.
• Another addition that I recently made is the RAP tooling. My daily work has changed and in the last months I am doing more RAP development than RCP development. I am not entirely sure if one needs both in one package, maybe RAP needs to go into its own package, but so far I think both technologies  complement each other. I am happy to get feedback – see bug 230357.
• Last but not least: The Marketplace Client (MPC) is included to allow early feedback – the developers of this nice tool need your feedback to bring it into the best possible shape for Helios!

Now let’s wait until the packages are available… and I need to go back preparing my EclipseCon slides.

Tags: egit, git, helios, rap, rcp

Would you like to get an overview of the best features in RAP in 5 minutes?

We just stumbled across this video on YouTube that shows what a modern RAP application can look like (including some new 1.3 features like DnD).

It is stunning that this video presents our vision with RAP much better than we have done it by ourselves so far … and it is always encouraging to see that others are using RAP at this level to create applications that are both technically and visually convincing.

Tags: rap, screencasts

Just in time for EclipseCon, Eclipse 3.6 M6 is now available for download.  I’m pretty excited about some of the new features in this milestone, especially some of the things from PDE.

Feature based launches (and feature based targets) should make bundle management a lot easier.

There is also a new tool to help you manage your target platforms.  You can search p2 repositories and add elements to your target. (I’m particularly stoked about this feature since I helped Chris Aniszczyk with the implementation).

There are a lot of other exciting things in this milestone too.  You can read all about them at the New and Noteworthy:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.6M6-201003121448/eclipse-news-M6.html

You can download M6 from:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.6M6-201003121448/index.php

Or update to it using p2:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.6milestones/

Yup, that could be you. On your boat, cruising past Saba Rock in the British Virgin Islands, learning Eclipse RCP or Equinox/OSGi.

Twice a year the Eclipse Foundation runs the Eclipse Training Series and the Spring ’10 sessions were announced earlier today. The series has always been a great opportunity for the community to learn more about the technologies they are (or should be) using.

This year EclipseSource is very pleased to announce that we are offering a number of courses in a “virtual classroom” format. Over the past few months we have tried out this idea and found that it has worked quite well.  The courses are run largely in the same sequence as in-person classes using the same materials but using screen sharing and web conferencing facilities. Despite the lack of personal contact, participants report a solid learning experience and very much appreciate not having to travel.

We are also expanding our virtual offerings into our RAP, p2 and PDE build courses. Of course, we continue to provied in-person classes. Check out the full Eclipse training lineup.

Tags: eclipse, equinox, OSGi, training

Earlier today we released a new version of the sample code for the OSGi and Equinox book. This new version has many updates to the Samples Manager itself as well as updated code for several chapters. Check out all the details on the book blog.

We have also added the ability to download the whole Samples Manager software site as a zip.  See the downloads page for more details on how to get the samples.

Finally, we’ve added forums to the book site and encourage readers to share their experiences, questions and discoveries.

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate

One of the key aspects of Agile Software Development — or any iterative software development process — is keeping your customer in-the-loop. In order for customers to have a voice in the software development process they must continually consume your software, provide feedback, and witness the results of that feedback. In a small setting this might not be to hard. But when you mix in a variety of different configurations, distributed development teams, and distributed customers — delivering and updating software can become a challenge.

Not only do your customers need to acquire the proper configurations, and stay up-to-date as the software is developed, your development team must also be developing against the latest code base. Again, in small teams it might be practical to checkout the entire codebase from your SCM system, but does this scale to multi-million line systems?

The Equinox/p2 project provides a powerful provisioning platform that can be used to help deliver software in number of different forms. At EclipseCon this year, Kim Moir and I will be exploring how you can use p2 as a platform to help enable agile software development. While the tutorial will focus on how p2 can facilitate agile software development, the tutorial will also provide a good overview for anyone getting started with p2 and PDE/Build.

In particular, we will discuss how to:

1. Create, publish and provision a variety of product configurations
2. Enable automatic updates within your products
3. Craft and manage target platforms

The hands on exercises will explore the new p2 API, PDE/Build and many of the headless p2 applications. The exercises will be based off the Hyperbola chat client from the new Eclipse RCP Book.  (We may even have a preview of the book on display at the tutorial).  If you are interested in how to streamline the deployment of your software, are looking for an update mechanism for RCP or OSGi based applications, or are just curious about p2, please feel free to attend our tutorial.

Tags: eclipsecon, p2

Here’s a nice addition to Riena’s TableRidget: you can now mark a table-row as incorrect.

This is done with an RowErrorMessageMarker. When hovering over the marked row, the corresponding error message will be shown in a tooltip.

IMarker marker = new RowErrorMessageMarker("An error message...", zorro);
tableRidget.addMarker(marker);
// to remove:
tableRidget.removeMarker(marker);

Full snippet here. This is shipping with the upcoming Riena 2.0 M6.

Tags: eclipse ui, riena, swt, tips