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.
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.
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.
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.
A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at EclipseRT Day in sunny Austin, Texas. The day started off with Jeff McAffer speaking about building component based applications using OSGi and EclipseRT.
From my point of view, the audience took a liking to the Toast example that Jeff used to describe EclipseRT. There’s something to be said about a consistent example that people can grab the source and build upon themselves.
The next talk I attended was by Austin Riddle and Cole Markham from the Texas Center for Applied Technology.
I was blown away by what these folks were doing with EclipseRT technology. From bio-surveillance tracking, preventing and managing the spread of animal disease to monitoring coastal waters off the United States. On top of that, they created a platform for building simulation and information dashboards using the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). Their story of Eclipse technology usage was oh so familiar. At first, they started as humble Eclipse IDE users. Then they started to create some useful applications on top of Eclipse RCP. Then they started to use other technologies from the Eclipse stack. Then they noticed that they could build a platform for their domain using Eclipse technologies.
Afterward, I had the opportunity to talk about the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and the topic of single-sourcing. It seems people were very receptive about the idea to develop rich and web clients from a single code base. It’s an attractive proposition when you can reuse your existing set of skills and tools to build applications for different runtime environments. There were some concerns about scalability, but the RAP team is actively working on improving performance issues and making performance results available.
Brett Hackleman from Band XI presented about how they were leveraging EclipseRT and OSGi in the embedded device world over the course of a dozen projects in the defense, heavy equipment, industrial automation and automotive domains. It’s cool to see OSGi used in the embedded space along with the custom SWT widgets they came up with for their domain.
Mike Masterson from IBM spoke about how Lotus had to reinvest in their portfolio, including the 20-year young Notes platform. Lotus decided to use EclipseRT as the base of their Notes platform which unified their client strategy and allows them to foster a rich partner ecosystem through the extensibility that EclipseRT provides. Lotus users can easily extend their Notes experience via widgets that developers can write using EclipseRT technology.
On the whole, I thought the event was fantastic. The talks were great and having the opportunity to meet new people that are building on Eclipse technologies is always fun. I can only hope the Eclipse Foundation puts on more events like this in the future. The more opportunity we have for everyone to interact with each other in person within the Eclipse community is a great thing.
Jeff McAffer and I will be in beautiful Vienna the first week of December.
Thanks to the accommodating DemoCamp organizers, we will be presenting EclipseRT and Toast at the Vienna Eclipse DemoCamp. There are already over 50 people registered!
As always, if you’re in the area and want to grab a frosty beverage, please let me know. I would love to hear what the Eclipse community is doing in the Vienna area! I’m always looking for food and frosty beverage recommendations. I hear there are good cakes in Vienna and that Stiegel is pretty good!
As a gentle reminder, today is the last day to register for the upcoming EclipseRT Day in Austin.
There are currently about 70 people registered, representing over 20 companies in the Austin area.
I hope to see everyone next week!
This week, we’ll be participating at Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
Here are our activities based on day.
Tuesday, October 27th
Wednesday, October 28th
Thursday, October 29th
Finally, feel free to say hello to us and stop by the EclipseSource booth (#27).
Enjoy the conference!
Good news everyone, the Eclipse PDE team finally made the visualization component available for everyone.
To obtain it, use the Install New Software wizard in Eclipse and point to the correct repository.
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/pde/visualization/updates
The plan is to ship this as part of the Eclipse Helios release.
In its current state, the tool visualizes OSGi bundles only. There is some discussion about adding support for features and packages. If you’re interested in contributing to the visualization tool, please let the PDE team know.
If you find bugs or have feature ideas, please enter them in bugzilla.
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