At EclipseCon I had the pleasure of presenting an introductory tutorial on p2 with an awesome co-presenter Kim Moir.

The tutorial went well, although we did have a few technical problems at the beginning. We knew there was way too much material to cover in a 3 hour tutorial, and if we started cutting it down then we wouldn’t get to the advanced material (which 1/2 the people want to see). If we started with the advanced material then we would loose the other half of the audience.    So either way, 1/2 of the room will be disappointed.  We decided to shoot somewhere in the middle and make the tutorial available as an Eclipse plug-in. This way, if you need a little more time, you could work through it at your own pace. If you are a p2 wiz, then you could whip ahead and take an early lunch.

If you couldn’t make the tutorial, the plug-in is available here as a p2 repository. The tutorial was designed to work with Eclipse 3.6 M6, so you will likely have to download that version of Eclipse. Once you have Eclipse 3.6 M6, simply open Help->Install New Software…

1. Enter http://download.eclipsesource.com/~irbull/p2-tutorial
2. Make sure you UN-CHECK GROUP BY CATEGORY!
3. Select p2 Tutorials Tools

Once installed, you can open the view called RCP Book Samples Manager (our plug-in was based on the famous samples manager from the Eclipse RCP Book).

You can use the samples manager to move between the different parts of the tutorial. You can even compare the solution to the start to see exactly what you have to do for each task.

If you have questions or feedback on the tutorial, please don’t hesitate to contact me at irbull (at) eclipsesource (dot) com.

Tags: eclipsecon, p2

EclipseCon was very good this year. The new venue and some new format ideas seemed to work. It was a lot more intimate and easier to spot people. Lunch was packed but that made it harder for people to sit isolated in their own little group (that’s a good thing).  Moreover, the talks were very good. I made a concerted effort to go to more talks and was well rewarded. It seems that others were as well.

One of the great things we’ve been doing for a few years now is the talk voting.  Simply by dropping a card in one of three buckets as you exit the talk you can signal a +1, 0 or -1 for the talk. You can also leave text comments which the team collects, transcribes and eventually distributes to the speakers.

The talk voting results were put up on the EclipseCon site recently. There are a number of interesting points.

• Of course, Jeff Norris’ keynote got rave reviews. Nearly 300 people cast their +1 for the talk and not a single -1.  Surprisingly three lost soles voted 0. Not sure what what it would take to get their approval but…
• We don’t know the full number of people at each talk but based on the keynote responses, it seems like roughly 50-60% talk attendees vote. I figure there were about 500 people at each keynote and there were 250-300 votes in each. Not sure if that translates for the smaller sessions but its a data point. Would be good to get the voter turn out up next year. I mean, you’re right there…
• Of the over 6500 votes cast, only ~7% of attendees did not like (-1) the talk they went to and over 70% were very pleased (+1) with what they saw. That is pretty impressive with such a varied group.
• About half of the talks received no -1 votes!

I was particularly pleased to see that the OSGi Best Practices talk I did with Paul, Martin and Chris was well received (111 +1′s, 8 0′s and no -1′s).

We were less lucky on the OSGi tutorial.  72% where very pleased but a few (4%) were disappointed and the rest were, well, ok with it. We’ll have to see what the write-in reports say. For sure the room was packed and there were a few issues getting setup and running. Seems par for the tutorial course but still not satisfactory. Perhaps next year we can do better both on the setup and structure but also on the facilities.

In any event, another great EclipseCon done.  Everyone involved in running the show and presenting should be proud.  Thanks for all your hard work. Well done.

Tags: eclipsecon

Last summer when Galileo was released, I wrote a series of blogs in which I discussed my top 10 favorite features of the release.  Somebody at the Eclipse Foundation must have enjoyed the read because I won a free conference pass to EclipseCon 2010.  I thought it would only be fitting to share my top 10 moments from EclipseCon 2010 with all of you.  These are roughly in the order in which they happened (roughly).

1. p2 Tutorial

On Monday morning I had the pleasure of presenting a tutorial on p2. We had a few technical glitches with the USB sticks, but other than that, I thought the tutorial went well.  I was really lucky to have such a great co-presenter (Kim Moir).  The funny thing was, we only met a few hours early (in the bar, no less). I will post the slides and the examples for those of you interested.

2. Meeting everyone

One of the great things about EclipseCon is I finally get to meet everyone.  It’s great to finally put a face to all those people I only talk to on Twitter, bugzilla, mailing lists, conference calls, etc… Meeting people is also a great way to pay off your beer debt. I was really happy to meet the rest of the p2 team (Susan and Simon), our new top contributor Lars Vogel, PDE expert Benjamin Cabe, Build / Testing machine Dave Carver,  EclipseCon program chair Oisin Hurley, etc…

3. Jeff’s keynote

By far, the best keynote I have ever seen at any conference was given Wednesday morning by Jeff Norris.  I don’t know if live demos are rocket science, but very few people would try to control a 7 foot robot from a few hundred miles away — on a Mac.  Jeff talked a lot about how they (NASA) makes use of Eclipse technology.  He’s keynote made me proud to be part of such a great community producing excellent technology.

4. API Tutorial

Martin Oberhuber, Boris Bokowski and Michael Scharf put on a great tutorial about API design.  I attended the tutorial because 1) I am generally interested in API design, 2) I think API design is at the core of software modularization and I don’t think many people truly understand this.  I attended the tutorial to get ideas on how we can better teach API design at the University level.  As part of the tutorial, Martin issued a challenge — to design an API to track the number of people in the room.  This was a lot of fun, and a few of us gathered in the evening to discuss our solutions.  It was interesting that everyone came up with a completely different solution.  Martin gave some good feedback (some of which I disagree with), but that’s the point of API design — there is no right answer. If I ever teach some of this material, I think I’ll use a similar exercise.

5. Build, Build and more Build

Build was a hot topic at this years EclipseCon.  Whether it was Maven, PDE/Build, Hudson, Athena, b3 or buckminster, Build was everywhere.  One of the most interesting panels I attended was the battle of the build gurus, moderated by Dave Carver.  Dave designed a Jeopardy like game to keep the panel focused.

6. GIT Tutorial

One of my goals for the conference was to understand Git, and Thursday mornings Git tutorial helped a lot.  Chris, Shawn, Matthias and Robin did an excellent teaching Git and explaining that Git is not simply a replacement for CVS but rather a completely different was to think about revision control.  If you are interested in learning more about Git, checkout Linus Torvalds’ tech talk about Git.

7. Running

A big shout-out goes to Kim Moir for organizing the Eclipse Exercise Program.  While nothing wakes you up like a 7:00am run, the exercise program is as much about socializing as it is about exercising.  We averaged about 30 people a day.

8. Helping to solve 300500

There are a few bugs that are hard to tackle without face-to-face time, bug 300500 is one of them.

9. The program and new layout

I thought the program and conference layout was spot on.  I particularly enjoyed having a tutorial each morning, followed by talks that got progressively shorter as the day went on. Ending each day with a series of panels was also a great idea.

10. OSGi and Equinox Book

Well not really part of EclipseCon, Jeff McAffer did give me a copy of the new Equinox/OSGi book and on the flight home I had a chance to read through some of it.  If you are looking for information about Equinox/OSGi, this is the book for you.  The sections on services are excellent.

I’m already looking forward to next years EclipseCon.

Tags: eclipsecon

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

Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, emf, helios, new and noteworthy, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

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:

1. Create, publish and provision a variety of product configurations
2. Enable automatic updates within your products
3. 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:

• CC yourself to Bug 302893, and
• come to our EclipseCon talk “Riena 2.0 - New & Noteworthy“

Tags: eclipsecon, rap, 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