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

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

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

Christmas is in the very near future and I have the pleasure to announce the availability of the forth milestone for next year’s Eclipse Simultaneous Release Helios: M4 is out! This time it was less than one week between the Eclipse Platform build (called ‘+0′) last Friday, several builds (‘+1′ to ‘+3′) this week where other Eclipse projects prepare their contributions, and the package build (called ‘EPP’ – what else?) yesterday.

You can go ahead and download one of the Helios EPP packages from this URL

http://eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/helios/m4

or you can update with the Release Train repository and the features from all participating projects from this URL

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios/

Everything is based on Eclipse 3.6M4.

Thanks again to everybody who helped to make this happen!

Tags: eclipse, epp, helios

The second milestone (M2) of next years’ Eclipse Simultaneous Release called Helios is now available!

I am proud that I am able to announce the availability of the corresponding Helios EPP M2 packages. You can download them from the usual EPP nightly build page www.eclipse.org/epp/download.php.

It’s the first time ever that the EPP packages are available so soon in the yearly release cycle and I think it is a good opportunity to get a lot of early feedback. The Eclipse Platform team did this all the time, but hopefully this will help other projects to get more testing by the community.

Thanks to all that helped to make this happen!

Tags: epp, helios, milestone

Only 4 days until the final Galileo SR1 bits are going to be released on Friday, time to write about some good news:

First of all, there is bug 281501 “64 bit Cocoa EPP packages should be available” which is currently the most wanted bug at Eclipse. I never thought that I would ever be the one who owns the bug with the highest number of votes, but finally it is solved and 64-bit Cocoa packages will be available with Galileo SR1. If you have a Mac and if you are able to run these packages, download one of the 20090920-1025 builds, test it and report on the above bug. I would be thankful for additional testing because I am lacking the possibility to test on this platform.

Another great achievement is the ability to upgrade the packages with the help of p2. This morning I tested to upgrade several Galileo packages to the new service release and it worked very well! Look at the About Dialog of the RCP package before the upgrade  – I started with a pristine download from eclipse.org/downloads:

Then I had to modify the URLs of the p2 repositories in Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites – see the screenshot below. Note that this step is only required until the final bits are released, because they are only available from a temporary location at the moment. After the release nobody has to change anything here, especially the EPP repository URL is only temporary for build 241.

The last step is the update itself (Help > Check for Updates). This takes some time, but at the end I could restart my Eclipse RCP package and it started with the new Galileo SR1 version:

I am happy to see this working!

Tags: epp, galileo, p2

Twenty-four hours after opening the flood gates and releasing Galileo I thought I could provide some statistics. Over a year ago I started one of my talks at EclipseCon announcing that every 3 seconds someone starts a download of a packages that we create in my Eclipse Packaging Project.

But everything is different in the first few days after a release. When I checked the download page and the download counter I calculated that there were about 100000 downloads of the packages (including the ‘classic’ SDK). This means that every 0.9 seconds a package has been downloaded! Cool. Just a few more numbers:

• Java EE package with more than 50000 downloads so far
• Total amount of data (all packages): More than 15 TBytes (15000 GBytes!)
• Average bandwidth necessary to serve this data: 1600 MBits/s

Then I checked the logfiles of our own EclipseSource servers. In addition to our download mirrors we decided this year to provide package downloads from the Cloud. Maybe you have seen then new download links to Eclipse members on the download page:

If you choose our “Get It Faster Here” offering you are downloading the packages from Amazon Cloud Front. It is hard to say how many people were using this service in the first 24 hours, because many people were using download managers (something that prevents me from providing exact numbers based on the logfiles). But what I can provide here is a statistic about the download speed in MBits per second:

You can see that most people are sitting behind Internet connections that can deliver 5 to 20 MBits/s, but some have really fast pipes. For example, I was testing our downloads from a large research facility here in Germany and I got a download speed of more than 280 MBits/s!

I think that’s great. You don’t have to wait for downloads any more!

Tags: eclipse, epp, galileo, p2

As of a few minutes ago, Galileo RC3 EPP packages are available from the Eclipse website. You can download them via a direct link to the Galileo RC3 packages website or by opening the main Eclipse download page.  Note, if you go that way, you need to switch to the “Develompent Builds” tab.

Why am I writing this? The main reason is that we – myself and all the other package maintainers – like to get feedback about the packages. This year, we provide even more packages! There will be a new PHP package (the name is self explanatory) and the Pulsar package which contains the bits from the Pulsar Working Group.

Back to the main topic: Feedback. If you want to send us bug reports about the packages, you can do so by pressing the “more…” link on one of the download pages:

This will bring you to a page where you can find in-depth information about every package. On the right-hand side, you will find a section with download links, MD5 and SHA1 checksums, but also relevant Bugzilla queries and a direct link that allows you to send bug reports about a particular package.

But before opening a new bug, please read through the list of open bugs to avoid duplicates and consider filing the bug against a particular project if its related to a project and not to the package itself.

…and the logo that appears on every eclipse.org web page reminds me again: Galileo arrives in just a few weeks!

Tags: eclipse, epp, galileo

We are all busy preparing our talks and demonstrations for EclipseCon, aren’t we? This year I am trying to use in all of my talks a common set of examples.

The plan is to showcase technology from several projects. I will start with the EPP Download Wizard (at the moment ‘Friends-of-Eclipse’ only) from my EPP project that has been build as a RAP application and uses Equinox, p2, and the p2 installer. With the EPP Download Wizard, a user is able to pick and choose from a set of available installable units. On the last wizard page, he or she can download a small customized p2 installer that will download the selected pieces from the p2 repositories. There will be various talks about the things that we do in EPP, e.g. the talk of my colleagues about the internals of the EPP Wizard, or my other talk about the EPP Usage Data Collector.

But what if a developer who is developing this wizard or another application wants to deploy it on a server? The first problem: You need a server! The answer to this question is easy: Use g-Eclipse, our Grid and Cloud Computing tooling, and start your own server on the cloud. This can be done within minutes and we are going to show this in our Equinox above the Cloud talk.

Now that you have your own server up and running, all you need to do is deploying your application on it. But how is this done… well, attend our talk and you will find out how easy it is with p2!

Tags: aws, cloud computing, ec2, ecf, eclipsecon, epp, g-Eclipse, OSGi, p2, rap

I have to admit: 23 is the number that I like most. Some computer scientists and mathematicians prefer 42, but this is not a prime number.

Why am I starting this blog entry with this odd number? Because my birthday is on a 23rd? While this is true, it is not particular interesting. But if you are going to the EPP project page where you see the EPP package builds for all Ganymede Releases you will find out that every Ganymede build that has been released to the public in the past was in fact build on a 23rd.

Look at the screenshot: Ganymede Release build on June, 23rd – Ganymede ServiceRelease 1 on September, 23rd, and now the Ganymede Service Release 2 build on February, 23rd.

And now I am happy that I can write: The new Ganymede SR2 packages are now available for download. There are still some problems on the different download web pages but I am sure those problems will be fixed by the webmasters soon. I think this is good news at the end of a long week.

BTW: How many Eclipse projects did participate in Ganymede? Yes, exactly 23!

Tags: eclipse, epp, ganymede