In days gone by the EclipseCon online program had ics calendar entries so you could just click and have a talk added to your calendar. The other day I was setting up my EclipseCon schedule (wow, hard decisions) and noticed that calendar entries were missing. After a few iterations with Don and Gabe as we struggled with the vagaries of timezone support in ics files, we now have the calendar entry links back! Check it out! See the calendar icon on the right side?
Thanks Gabe and Don for the fast turn-around on this very useful service.
Tags: eclipsecon
One of the key aspects of Agile Software Development — or any iterative software development process — is keeping your customer in-the-loop. In order for customers to have a voice in the software development process they must continually consume your software, provide feedback, and witness the results of that feedback. In a small setting this might not be to hard. But when you mix in a variety of different configurations, distributed development teams, and distributed customers — delivering and updating software can become a challenge.
Not only do your customers need to acquire the proper configurations, and stay up-to-date as the software is developed, your development team must also be developing against the latest code base. Again, in small teams it might be practical to checkout the entire codebase from your SCM system, but does this scale to multi-million line systems?
The Equinox/p2 project provides a powerful provisioning platform that can be used to help deliver software in number of different forms. At EclipseCon this year, Kim Moir and I will be exploring how you can use p2 as a platform to help enable agile software development. While the tutorial will focus on how p2 can facilitate agile software development, the tutorial will also provide a good overview for anyone getting started with p2 and PDE/Build.
In particular, we will discuss how to:
- Create, publish and provision a variety of product configurations
- Enable automatic updates within your products
- Craft and manage target platforms
The hands on exercises will explore the new p2 API, PDE/Build and many of the headless p2 applications. The exercises will be based off the Hyperbola chat client from the new Eclipse RCP Book. (We may even have a preview of the book on display at the tutorial). If you are interested in how to streamline the deployment of your software, are looking for an update mechanism for RCP or OSGi based applications, or are just curious about p2, please feel free to attend our tutorial.
Tags: eclipsecon, p2
I’ve spend the last few days adjusting the Ridget layer in Riena, to make it work with Eclipse RAP and Eclipse RCP. We call this process “single-sourcing” (EclipseCon tutorial).
Ridgets wrap around standard SWT / RWT controls to provide additional functionality and a better API. One example that you can see below: Ridgets have “markers”, which tag a control as mandatory, wrong or read-only and change the control’s behavior accordingly.
It’s worth mentioning that all three screenshots run from the same code. The only difference is the target environment used (RAP or RCP).
Ridgets styled with RAP's "business" theme
Ridgets styled with RAP's "classic" theme
Ridgets in a regular RCP application
Once this work is completed the Ridget API will be usable for RAP applications as well.
To stay informed about this effort:
Tags: eclipse rap, eclipsecon, riena
As I left EclipseCon I was a little surprised there wasn’t the famous +1, -1, 0 buckets outside the Hyatt. I wanted to cast my vote for the entire conference. I had a great week and I learned a lot, although there were 2 things that disappointed me.
First, I was not able to attend all the sessions I wanted too. Maybe others have advice because I don’t know how anyone can attend all the interesting talks / tutorials, meet all the interesting people, hack on cool new ideas, follow twitter (and don’t forget to tweet), read all the blogs (and don’t forget to write), attend the BoFs, settle all your “Beer Dept”, help close down the bar at 1:30am and join the running group at 7:00am. I did my best, but I probably only accomplished a 10th of what I set out to do. (If I didn’t repay my Beer Dept to you, please find me at next years EclipseCon).
The second dissapointment was that I had to leave. Of course I’m happy to be home with my wife and daughters, (and my liver is happy that EclipseCon is over), I would love to spend another week chatting with everyone.
On my way home I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sitting next to David Green of WikiText fame. David gave me a tour of his work on WikiText and we spent the 2 hour flight chatting about Eclipse. It was like I got an extra session for free.
So if my only two complaints about the week was that there was too much interesting stuff and eventually I had to go home, I think it is safe to say I would have given the EclipseCon a +1.
Scott Rosenbaum, you did an excellent job of general program chair, and Bjorn, you ran another awesome conference. It was great to see everyone again!!!
Tags: eclipsecon
The EclipseSource team is enjoying its time at EclipseCon 2009. Here’s a reminder of what our team is talking about today.
Ralf Sternberg and Rudiger Herrmann gave a tutorial about “Single Sourcing RCP and RAP.”
Jeff McAffer and Ian Bull are giving a tutorial on “Understanding and extending p2 for fun and profit.” Come learn about p2!
I’m really excited about Scott Lewis giving a tutorial on “Distributed OSGi – The ECF way.” I hope the tutorial is highly attended given that the ECF implementation of Distributed OSGi is the only complete one (includes discovery) so far and it’s very lightweight!
If you see us around, feel free to stop by and chat with us!
Tags: eclipsecon, OSGi
I have been working on one of the most requested Zest features, custom figures, and by EclipesCon it will be finished. Now you are no longer stuck with those little blue rounded rectangles. You can construct all sorts of custom figures, or even make use of an ImageFigure.
Zest Custom Figure
You can either do this by creating a CGraphNode, or in the viewer by using an IFigureProvider (as your label provider). Now we can construct some UML Style visualizations using Zest. Is anybody interested in trying to hook up an SVG parser (I think batik is part of Orbit)?
Want to learn about this and other cool Zest tips and tricks. Come see my talk at EclipseCon.
Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, zest
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
Riena 3.5.M6 is available, just in time for EclipseCon (new and noteworthy).
The Riena highlights at the conference next week:
- Come to the Riena BOF on Tuesday to discuss the project with the team. As one of the committers behind the UI (Ridgets), I’m looking forward to feedback from developers who consume it or are thinking about using it.
- If you’re new to Riena I highly recommend Christian’s talk ’Write a Client/Server application based on Riena in 25 minutes‘ on Wednesday. Christian shows how to write a Riena app quickly including creating the UI, using Ridgets, easy data-binding and access to the server with Remote Services. It’s a quick, hands-on overview of what Riena is about.
- The Riena talk I’m most curious about is Ekke’s and Florian’s presentation ‘Dynamic View for Business Applications (Riena + EMF + oAW)‘ on Thursday. Ekke and Florian are two of the most active members of the Riena community. As far as I can tell they have written a model-driven UI-generator based on Riena+EMF+oAW. Update 3/19: you can read more details here. I’m looking forward to their talk.
See you at EclipseCon,
Elias.
Tags: eclipse ui, eclipsecon, new and noteworthy, riena
I’ve been busy this weekend preparing one of the EclipseCon talks I will be doing together with Jordi. The background story to this talk is that we wanted to make it easier for users of Yoxos (and us of course) to deploy new versions of software along with relevant updates. Traditional “.war” deployments are very monolithic and inflexible. The deployment model is simplistic as you only have to support a single version (which may be advantageous to some). But for our needs, we needed a more modular approach to the problem. Since we are not in the business of reinventing circular transportation devices, we started looking at some existing technologies to get as much mileage as possible – so we can concentrate on other neat features.
With Equinox p2, Eclipse already has a powerful provisioning component that performs updates and installation of components… on the client side. Our goal was to leverage the effort that has gone into p2 and adapt the technology to work on the server side. The results are quite promising – with a small amount of effort, we could create a very flexible, modular and robust deployment mechanism. Has anyone else worked with p2 on the server side yet?
Find out more about the technical details at our talk “Down with WAR. Server-side deployment with p2” at EclipseCon. Hope to see you there!
Tags: eclipsecon, p2, server, war
The “conversation” around #eclipsecon is really starting to pick up. If you are following the blogs but not twitter, then you are only getting half the news.
Checkout the EclipseCon birds nest. What’s a birds nest? You’ll have to join to find out 
.
Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon
