As every year, the Eclipse Packaging Project EPP is part of this release and has created packages based on the Eclipse Platform 4.3M2 milestone. These packages allow for early testing and feedback. They are available from the development tab on the main Eclipse download page at eclipse.org/downloads/index-developer.php and from the packaging site.
Today we are starting with only a few packages and will add the remaining packages to the download page as soon as they are tested and approved by their package maintainers.

As an example open the Hudson Dashboard at Eclipse at hudson.eclipse.org and you will get:

• A list with all jobs… I already knew that we have plenty of them, but I was a bit surprised that we’ve got around 400 different jobs at the moment.
• Around 20 views that try to sort the jobs into some meaningful categories.

If you are interested only in the results of a few of the jobs, you could ask the webmasters in a bug to create a new view, but that doesn’t scale very well.

Both build servers, Hudson and Jenkins, provide a simple mechanism to bring order into the chaos of build jobs, and to filter out everything that is not necessary. After you log into Hudson/Jenkins, you can create your own views. Just click on ‘My Views’ and create your own views. You can select individual jobs, or you can add jobs that match a particular regular expression. You can even decide which information you’d like to see about each job.

And the best thing is that everyone can use your views with the URL, there is no need to be logged in. You can send the link to your team and put it on your web page. For instance, you can find my own views here

• hudson.eclipse.org/hudson/user/mknauer/my-views/

and you can see the projects that I am currently working on: EPP – Eclipse Packaging Project, RAP, and of course the Simultaneous Releases Juno and Kepler.

The Eclipse Juno packages are available for download. Now!

Okay, then I cannot tell you any news, but the participating projects at Eclipse shipped another coordinated Simultaneous Release in time! This Indigo SR2 release contains many improvements and bug fixes, e.g. an update of the underlying platform to 3.7.2. It’s worth an update!

The packages for Indigo SR2 RC2 (the second release candidate for the second service release of the Indigo release, based on Eclipse Platform 3.7.2) and the packages for this year’s Simultaneous Release Juno M5 (the 5th milestone based on Eclipse Platform 4.2) are available:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index-developer.php

Please test and report any issues in Bugzilla. Especially the Eclipse 4.x team needs your help! The sooner bugs are found, the sooner they can be fixed!

One of the changes is the addition of Eclipse Code Recommenders to the Eclipse for RCP and RAP Developers package.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!