Well here we are just over half way through the NHL season and the norther hemisphere is in the middle of winter.  For those of you who don’t plan on spending the weekend watching the NHL All-Star game, you’ll be happy to know that Eclipse 3.7M5 is now available for download.

Milestone 5 comes backed with a number of new goodies including conditional breakpoint improvements:

Static analysis improvements, such as the ability to detect methods that can be declared static:

And Touch & Gesture support in SWT (for supported hardware)

There are also a number of features specific to Eclipse 4.1 such as detachable editors:

Checkout the complete New and Noteworthy, or better yet download Milestone 5 and try it yourself.

Eclipse 3.7 M5

Eclipse 4.1 M5

Tags: indigo

Yesterday Amazon launched a new service called AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It’s basically a Tomcat hosting service. You can upload your WAR files via a web interface, to an instance of a Linux cloud image pre-configured with Tomcat. This is from the official Amazon description:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an even easier way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is easy to begin and impossible to outgrow.

So, as an Eclipse guy the first question that comes to mind is, “Does OSGi/Equinox run on this?” I mean, it definitely should because we have the great Server-Side Equinox technology which we can deploy in a WAR file. So, I did a little experiment which everyone can repeat on his own. It took only 5 minutes to confirm that Equinox can run on Amazon’s Beanstalk. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Server-Side Equinox Application and package it into a WAR file. If you want to use an existing file I recommend that you download the rapdemo.war from the RAP Examples Demo. RAP Applications are basically Server-Side Equinox Applications with a UI.
2. Create an AWS Account and activate AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Follow the steps described in the AWS Management console.
3. Use the Web Interface to upload your example war archive. Don’t forget to check “Launch a new environment running this Application”.
4. After the upload is successful you have to wait a few minutes until the instance is started. When this is finished your application will be online and reachable under name-of-your-application.beanstalk.com. The example I deployed can be reached using this URL: http://eclipserap.elasticbeanstalk.com/

It was highly likely that Equinox was going to work on the beanstalk. But to be certain it works, is even better.  I can also say that I was really impressed by how easy it is to get a WAR file running on the beanstalk.  Just  two years ago, the only option you had to deploy a WAR file was to rent a (V)Server and set up Tomcat on your own. The question for me  now is how long it will take until the deployment of OSGi bundles will be so easy. Oh wait, there is Eclipse RTP…

Tags: amazon, beanstalk, eclipse, equinox, rap, rtp, server-side, tomcat

Recently I played around a little with Tycho because we evaluated it for the use in the RTP project. As a test case, I decided to try to build a RAP application with Tycho. With building I mean compiling and packaging the artifacts into a WAR file in order to deploy them on a Tomcat or another Servlet Container.

I have to say that I’m really impressed with Tycho. Before this experience, Maven was the “bad thing that downloads the internet” to me. Okay, it still downloads the internet but in this case it’s very useful. You can add p2 repositories to resolve dependencies and it automatically downloads the right bundles. You can define the dependencies in your MANIFEST.MF and use the pom.xml to describe what kind of package it is, e.g. a feature or bundle. For building the RAP application, I just had to add the Helios p2 repository to solve all my feature’s dependencies.

Now, you might want to know how to build the application with Tycho yourself. I published the code on github [1]. It’s just the example Mail application and a sample feature that can be built with Tycho. Follow the README instructions to run the build. Here are a few notes you might need if you want to use this configuration as a template for your own build:

1. Edit the feature.xml from com.eclipsesource.maildemo.tycho.feature, adding your dependencies.
2. The build uses a static configuration.ini. As a result, you have to edit the configuration manually and add your own bundles. You will find the configuration.ini in the com.eclipsesource.maildemo.tycho.feature feature in the templates/WEB-INF/eclipse/configuration folder.
3. Create a pom.xml for every bundle you created with the following content:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <project xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd" xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
     <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
     <parent>
       <artifactId>maildemo</artifactId>
       <groupId>com.eclipsesource</groupId>
       <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
     </parent>
     <groupId>com.eclipsesource</groupId>
     <artifactId>com.eclipsesource.maildemo.tycho</artifactId>
     <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
     <packaging>eclipse-plugin</packaging>
   </project>

4. Change the artifactId from com.eclipsesource.maildemo.tycho to your own Id.  You’ll also need to change the parentId when you use your own Id.
5. Edit the pom.xml in the parent folder and add your modules. To add modules you just need to add the folder names from the different bundles to the file.
6. In the pom.xml of the feature, change the naming of the “maildemo” to create a .war file with the name of your choice.
7. Of course you can use your own groupIds and artifactIds. But, you have to reference the parent pom.xml artifactId in every bundle’s pom.xml

I hope these steps and the example build will help you to create your own Tycho based builds for RAP applications. Maybe you have some experiences or ideas you’d like to share?  Please feel free to post comments.

[1] https://github.com/hstaudacher/org.eclipse.rap.build.examples

Tags: build, eclipse, hudson, indigo, jenkins, rap, tycho

A few weeks ago I told you about the Eclipse RTP project. Since then some things happened that I want to share with you.

First of all, we made it to the creation review. The review is scheduled for January 12-19. The community gathering period was very successful. We reached 10 interested parties and 7 initial committers from three different companies. In this article, I’d like to focus on one very cool thing. It’s the effort made by SAP.

As you might have seen in the last months, SAP is involved in more than the half of the new Eclipse projects. Probably the main reason behind this is that SAP submitted the most project proposals . But reading about it and getting in touch with the guys behind this company are two different things as we learned in the RTP project. So, let’s review the SAP + RTP story:

In December a colleague of mine, Florian Waibel, made his way through closed airports and meters of snow to South Hampton, UK to have a face-to-face meeting with the Virgo guys. During this meeting he also talked about RTP and gained some interest from some of the people there. Back home he told me about SAP getting heavily involved in Virgo and also about their interest in RTP. Because we are an open Eclipse project we got in touch with a friendly SAP project manager (thanks Krassi) and had discussions about the RTP project and how an internal development project from SAP could fit into RTP. Well, the result was that SAP was so interested that we extended the scope of the project together and will now receive an initial contribution from SAP called the “p2 installer”. Of course, Eclipse is not a software dumping area. That’s why they will provide a maintainer for this contribution who will also be an initial committer.  Welcome Georgi Stanev .

The “p2 installer” is basically a command line interface for the official p2 installer to manage remote Eclipse runtime installations. The purpose of this tool was to enable automated scripts to install Eclipse runtime to remote systems. The cool thing about it is the ability to define the units that should be installed in a property file declaratively. Yesterday we had a short demo of the installer and I have to say that it looks very exciting.

To put it all in a nutshell it’s really good to see SAP working actively in and with the open source community. They are not shy about donating things and providing guidance. It’s very nice to see a really big player supporting open source in positive ways.

Tags: eclipse, indigo, p2, rtp, runtime, sap