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
Today we formalized some changes in the Eclipse Series of books. Some time ago Lee Nackman left IBM and his various roles related to Eclipse. Many of you may not know Lee but he was instrumental in the early days of Eclipse and IBM’s ongoing contribution and commitment to Eclipse. Lee, Erich Gamma and John Weigand envisioned and created the Eclipse Series of more then 20 books that today conveys so much vital information to the Eclipse community.
I’m pleased to report that I am taking over Lee’s place on the Eclipse Series editorial board. One of my first tasks has been to help in the redesign of the series look. The result of that effort can be seen in the OSGi and Equinox book going to press this week.
The original series had a sequence of Eclipse photos. This was fitting and attractive. Unfortunately, many of the photos looked similar and as a result is was hard to distinguish one book from another. For the new look we have standardized on a new color scheme and layout. Different books will have distinct images largely at the discretion of the authors but the overall look will be consistent.
We have also introduced a subtle branding differentiation through the use of the Eclipse or EclipseRT logos (see the top left corner) depending on their focus (tooling vs. runtime).
In this new role I will be looking for new ways to drive the content that the community needs. Writing a book is a huge investment and while many teams have made very significant technical contributions, they are not big enough or well-funded enough to write books. There are a few ideas kicking around for how to lower the barrier and what topics are in most need of coverage. While we have great wealth of new projects at Eclipse, the book pipeline is surprisingly sparse.
As with everything at Eclipse, the community can help. Your suggestions for formats, topics and indeed, content are more than welcome. Feel free to contact me directly or post comments on this blog.
Tags: books, eclipse, syndicate
Today, the Eclipse Foundation announced two new projects at Eclipse.org, Graphiti and Virgo.
The Graphiti project aims to offer an Eclipse-based graphics framework to enable easy development of state-of-the-art diagram editors for domain models. SAP plans to contribute the developed framework. This could have a large impact in the Eclipse Modeling space where graphic modeling is only getting better and better. The contribution is also important because SAP is showing that it’s strongly committed to the Eclipse ecosystem.
The Virgo project will provide a runtime platform for the development of server-side enterprise applications built on top of Equinox, and optionally using modules from the Gemini project. On top of that, the Virgo project solidifies the EclipseRT vision that a lot of us have been preaching for awhile.
Want to learn more about EclipseRT? Check out the whitepaper.
Another thing to note about the Virgo project is that tooling will be coming along but contributed to specific projects at Eclipse.
Developer tools that provide support for Virgo are out of scope for the Virgo project as part of EclipseRT. However, the Virgo team also propose to work with the existing WTP and PDE projects to contribute relevant developer tools for Virgo to those projects. These contributions will be based upon the existing Bundlor and dm Server development tools projects detailed below.
So far, it looks like three out of twelve zodiac signs are taken for OSGi related projects.
Which one will be next 
?
Tags: eclipse, gemini, OSGi, virgo
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
Just in time for the Holidays, the Eclipse platform team has made Eclipse 3.6 Milestone 4 available.
Feel free to download it:
http://download.eclipse.org/equinox/drops/S-3.6M4-200912101301/index.php
Upgrade to it:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.6milestones
or just browse the New and Noteworthy:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.6M4-200912101301/eclipse-news-M4.html
There’s a whole host of new features such as Virtual Folders
and the ability to execute multiple quick fixes at once:
Enjoy the early Christmas present
Tags: eclipse, helios
On December 14, 2009, the Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar that will include speakers from Cisco, Morgan Stanley and eBay discussing deploying Eclipse to thousands, and even tens of thousands, of their developers.
Here’s the breakdown of the schedule…
- Dennis Vaughn, Cisco
- Scalability (65k + source files)
- Diverse Deployments (geographically, NFS, OS/Versions)
- Engineering Environment Diversity (legacy tools, acquisitions)
- Working Culture (curmudgeons versus new hires, ROI versus VI/Emacs)
- Miles Daffin, Morgan Stanley
- Enterprise Constraints and their Consequences for Eclipse Provisioning
- Next Steps: Further Reduce Total Cost of Ownership and Provide more Useful Features as Needed
- Joep Rottinghuis, eBay
- Scalability (100k + source files)
- Deployment (individualized workspaces)
- Usage Tracking (who is using what, and what issues are in what versions)
- Manifest Maintenance (OSGi bundle/package versions)
Please register via email if you’re interested.
Tags: eclipse, OSGi
Support for drag and drop just made it into the RAP source code repository. You can use the same API as known from SWT and thus re-use even more code when single-sourcing RCP applications.
It will be available in the M4 build. In the meanwhile you can check out the sources from CVS and explore the new functionality online (go to the List page).
There are still some things left to do, for more details see this bug. We would be very happy to gain feedback about how your existing drag and drop code works on RAP. In case something doesn’t work as expected, please drop us a line or open a bug.
Tags: eclipse, rap, Single Sourcing, swt
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.
Tags: eclipse
As you may read in previous blogs we have adressed the RAP styling. Therefore we presented you the “big blocks” in form of the new RAP designs. But there is still a difference between RAP and other cool RIA technologies i.e. like ExtJS, Flex or qooxdoo. When you take a look at the demos of these frameworks they all come along with cool styled widgets out of the box. Take a look at the screenshots below to see what I mean.
ExtJS Combobox
Flex buttons
qooxdoo buttons
Now lets take a look at the RAP widgets and how they are styled out of the box:
RAP default widgets
As you may see, there is a little difference between the Flex, ExtJS, qooxdoo and the RAP widgets. RAP looks almost like Windows 95. This cannot be the way RAP presents itself to the world because RAP is a modern and cool technology for building full featured RIAs. For that reason we spent some effort to show you how RAP can look like:
Modern RAP theming
From my point of view these widgets have a really fresh look and are fully competitive against all the Flex, ExtJS and qooxdoo widgets. This styling is done via theming and by using the new theming features like gradients and rounded corners heavily. We plan to set this theme as the default theme for RAP 1.3 which will be released within the Helios release train.
But there is no reason to wait. You can use the theme right now. All you have to do is:
- Check out the latest and hottest RAP Milestone.
- Edit your branding to use the new themes. Set the theme id to
org.eclipse.rap.design.example.business.theme for the business theme or to org.eclipse.rap.design.example.fancy.theme for the fancy theme.
- Start your application and enjoy the fresh and modern look of you widgets.
Please note that not all widgets are themed right now, but more than 80% of the widgets have the new look allready. If you have feedback for the theme please let us know by using the newsgroup or by leaving a comment.
Tags: css, eclipse, helios, rap
Its mid-Movember and things are getting hairy in Eclipse-land. A dedicated team of committers, the Eclipse Mommitters, have banded together to grow moustaches to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Since I’m basically lazy and work at home, it happens that I’ve not shaved for a couple weeks. So, though late to Movember, I am fully prepared to produce a moustache.
Chris ran a poll to determine the kind of ‘stache he should grow. Great community involvement in setting direction. Keying off that I’m going to try and illustrate the causal connection between contribution and results. This can be applied to any community effort whether its men’s health or Eclipse itself.
The plan is to grow as much facial hair as possible and allow the highest donor to choose what kind of moustache I should sport for the last week of Movember. As an added bonus, it turns out that that week I will be teaching a course at a customer and presenting at the Ottawa Eclipse DemoCamp so there is some risk here for me…
The person with the highest cumulative donations on Movember 22nd at 23:59ET (or thereabouts) will be identified in a comment on this blog entry. If it looks particularly dangerous for me, I reserve the right to override the donor with a 2x donation. I will wear the designated moustache for the following week.
So get out the credit cards and put in your donation now. You can check out Mo progress first hand next week at one of the EclipseRT days in Austin or Toronto.
Tags: eclipse, syndicate
