After more than a year of work we have finally completed the entire OSGi and Equinox book. The text, artwork, index, front matter and now cover are done and will be off to the printer and a bookstore near you in the next few days.

The cover marks a departure from the original series style of Eclipse photos. The publisher and series editorial team felt that that theme had run its course and the wanted a new look. We are pleased to be the first book with the new look. Expect subsequent books in the series to have a similar upper portions with different main images in the lower half.

Note also the use of the EclipseRT logo on the upper right corner.

Books in the series will have either the Eclipse logo or the EclipseRT logo depending on their focus (tooling vs. runtime). The upcoming 2nd edition of the RCP book will be the second in the series to have the new cover style and the EclipseRT logo. We have not decided on the imagery yet though…

Happy reading…

Tags: eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi

Yesterday, the EclipseCon Program Committee made the final tough decisions and pressed the button to notify people if their submissions got accepted or not. I had the honor of putting together the Eclipse Runtime (EclipseRT) content.

If you’re coming to EclipseCon, you’ll have a great opportunity to learn about EclipseRT and OSGi.

Here are some of my favorite selections for runtime…

Tutorials

Getting Started with Eclipse RT
Build a Working OSGi Application
Building Server-Side Eclipse based web applications

Talks

Gemini – Helping Shape the Future of Enterprise Java
Composite Bundles – Isolating Applications in a Collaborative OSGi World
ScalaModules: OSGi the Easy Way with a Scala DSL

I hope you enjoy the program!

Tags: eclipseRT, equinox

Last week, Jeff McAffer and I had the honor to attend the Eclipse Vienna DemoCamp hosted at the beautiful TU Vienna campus.

There were about 80 people that showed up and many interesting talks were given. Instead of going through all of them, I’ll highlight some of the ones I personally enjoyed. The day started with Werner Keil giving a talk about the Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) project at Eclipse. STEM is a tool designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models can aid in understanding and potentially preventing the spread of such diseases. The STEM project should serve as a reminder that Eclipse is entering new verticals and isn’t just an IDE.

The next talk I found fascinating was e4 by Tom Schindl.

Tom did a great job explaining why e4 exists, why EMF and how people can get involved. In his demo, Tom was self-hosting the workbench using CDO. Since the workbench model is now based on EMF, there’s a lot of interesting technologies to take advantage of in the Eclipse Modeling space. Another talk that intrigued me was by Christoph Mayerhofer who spoke about ReviewClipse.

ReviewClipse is an integrated code review tool, that helps developers to review the source code continuously. From my point of view, this project is awesome and direly needed at Eclipse. If we had first class code review support at Eclipse and had it integrated with Mylyn… my life would be much simpler. At the moment, ReviewClipse only integrates with SVN, but future connectors are planned. The authors of the tool are looking for an open source license and I highly recommend they choose the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and move the code to Eclipse where more people would be exposed to the terrific tool. If you think this is a good idea too, please email the project.

After that, I enjoyed more talks from the Viennese Eclipse community.

Jeff McAffer and I also gave a talk introducing people to EclipseRT and Toast. It seems people are understanding what EclipseRT is really about now that we have a great example of the power of the technology via Toast. A decent example can speak volumes to potential adopters of your technology.

In the end, I’m amazed to see how strong the Austrian Eclipse community is and only see great things in terms of community growth. And finally, special thanks to Michael Clay and Peter Kofler for organizing the event and allowing us to speak.

Tags: democamp, eclipseRT

I enjoy seeing people use EclipseRT technology in the wild. Recently I met and spoke with Austin Riddle from the Texas Center for Applied Technology (TCAT) about how they are using the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and what applications they are building with it.

1. What does your application(s) do?

We have several live RAP applications that take the form of information dashboards. These dashboards allow decision-makers and analysts to disseminate information and produce a common operating picture related but not limited to global biosurveillance and large-scale emergency preparedness/management. Users can log in to our systems, customize their view of information via component and profile switching, visually integrate information within the dashboard and selectively share information between echelons of human infrastructure. Our US government customers have been very pleased with the power and flexibility of the systems.

2. Why did you choose Eclipse RAP?

We needed a powerful Rich Internet Application. We needed one that had to provide capabilities that frankly push the limits of what a traditional RIA could deliver. It also had to perform on older hardware and software. After working with and analyzing other options, including GWT, Flex, OpenLaszlo and others, we decided that RAP provided both the features we needed to fulfill our requirements, and the framework to develop custom features that empower our users even more. Being able to leverage other Eclipse Runtime Technology in our applications greatly reinforced our decision.

3. How did single sourcing benefit your project?

Our organization has a significant investment in Eclipse RCP capabilities that we needed to leverage in order to meet our dashboard requirements. It was amazing to see elements from our desktop systems just “appear” in our RAP application after just “dropping” the bundles in. Also, during our development process, we actually wrote capabilities in our RAP application that could be used in our desktop RCP applications. This “reverse” single sourcing was a pleasant surprise!

4. In the end, how did RAP help and benefit your project?

Most impressively, we were able to implement a first working prototype of a dashboard system in 30 days! RAP gave us the ability to rapidly prototype and ultimately provide solid systems that have withstood the scrutiny of rigorous government security evaluations. Currently, we are looking into bringing even more of our eclipse-based desktop investments to the web.

Cool stuff, huh?

Tags: case study, eclipseRT, rap, rcp

Over the past few days I have spoken to many different groups at the EclipseRT days, various democamps and some students in one of our Advanced RCP courses. Each time people have asked…

“when is the OSGi and Equinox book coming out?”

Most were hopeful, some were trying to get a rise out of me. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

I am very pleased to say that the full, pre-copy-edited content is available on Rough Cuts. There are a few minor differences between what is online and what will end up in print but that is mostly a bit of grammar and a few technical fixes. The early versions of all the code is available though there are a few known issues in the packaging that we are still working on.

I am really very happy with how the book has turned out.  The structure has lots of content for everyone.  Tutorials, deep-dives, reference material. As you can see by the table of contents below, we start with some history, context and concepts. Then there is a set of tutorial chapters where we build up an example fleet management application called Toast to have a funky embedded vehicle user interface with Google Earth integration, client0server connectivity as well as a back-end control center for managing the fleet.

The Toast system from Chapter 14, the final tutorial chapter, has been donated to Eclipse as the Toast Examples project where is has been extended to have a RAP UI for the backend, EMF and EclipseLink for data management, ECF for infrastructure bits, etc etc.

The tutorial is followed by a number of deep-dives on key topics such as Declarative Services, the HTTP service, Remote Services (RFC119) and more.  Finally there are a set of reference chapters that go even deeper and look at the grotty issues of classloading, dynamic behavior and third party code libraries. It’s a good range of the popular OSGi concepts and services. Of course, there is always room for more in a 2nd edition! (can’t believe I said that…)

Part I:   Introduction
1              OSGi and Equinox
2              Concepts

Part II :  Tutorial
3              Tutorial Introduction
4              Hello Toast
5              Services
6              Dynamic Services
7              Client/Server Interaction
8             Testing
9              Packaging
10           Pluggable Services
11            Extensible User Interfaces
12            Dynamic Configuration
13            Web Portal
14            System Deployment with p2

Part III: Deep Dives
15            Declarative Services
16            Extensions
17            Logging
18           HTTP Support
19            Server Side
20           Release Engineering

Part IV: Reference
21            Dynamic Best Practices
22           Integrating Code Libraries
23           Advanced Topics
24           Declarative Services Reference

Now for finishing up the 2nd edition of the RCP book.  Chris and I are together this week and will be plugging away at the final tweaks before the copy-editing phase. The first 13 chapters of that book have gone to the copy editors and are available on Rough Cuts.

Tags: book, eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi, p2, rap, syndicate

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.

Tags: eclipseRT, OSGi, rap

We’re all looking forward to talk about EclipseRT, Equinox and RAP at the DemoCamps around the world. In case you want to catch us and talk about Eclipse and related topics, just join one of the DemoCamps near you. Besides many other interesting talks, we’ll mostly cover EclipseRT, RAP and p2.

Ottawa, ON, Canada – November 24 – Jeff McAffer (EclipseRT)
Braunschweig/Hanover, Germany – November 25 – Benjamin Muskalla (RAP)
Stuttgart, Germany – November 26 – Jordi Boehme Lopez (p2)
Kaiserslautern, Germany – November 26 – Holger Staudacher (RAP)
Frankfurt, Germany – November 26 – Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT,RAP)
Vienna, Austria – November 30 – Chris Anisczcyk and Jeff McAffer (RAP,EclipseRT)
Karlsruhe, Germany – December 3 – Markus Knauer, Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT)
Hamburg, Germany – December 4 – Jochen Krause (RAP)

I’m really looking forward to see you at the DemoCamps, as always it tends to be a lot of fun!

Tags: democamp, e4, eclipseRT, equinox, helios, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

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.

Tags: eclipseRT, 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.

Tags: eclipseRT, OSGi

After another 6 weeks of working hard towards the Helios Release, we’re a step closer. RAP M3 for Eclipse 3.6 is out and can be obtained from the RAP project page. Besides another 130 bugfixes and many New and Noteworthy features, here are my personal favorites of this milestone:

Non-shared SWT resources

Finally, we decided to provide constructors and a dispose mechanism for SWT resources like fonts, images, colors and cursors. While we still recommend to use the factory-based approach, this features helps a lot when single-sourcing applications that use the resource constructors in a verbose manner.

Yay, it compiles!

Browser History support

You now have the possibility to interact with the client-side browser history. This allows you to set “bookmarks” (eg. when switching tabs or processing a particular workflow) and the user can jump back and forward. Thanks again to Ralf Zahn from ARS who contributed this feature.

Dispose events on session timeout

We also introduced new Listener support on the Display so you’re now able to listen for Dispose events of the Display which is triggered when the session terminates. This way you don’t need to rely on servlet-specific API but rather use the same mechanism as in SWT to clean up your session. In addition you can queue runnables via Display#disposeExec that are executed once the session dies.

I hope you all enjoy the new milestone and give as feedback as fast as possible, API and feature freeze  is approaching

Tags: eclipseRT, helios, milestone, new & noteworthy, rap