Sure, you’ve been reloading the eclipse.org/downloads web page once every minute over the past hours, you’ve been clicking on ‘Help’ > ‘Check for Updates’ in your Indigo Eclipse package, you’ve been monitoring the cross-project-issues-dev mailing list.

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!

Tags: eclipse, epp, indigo, new and noteworthy, release

Today’s a great day. The Eclipse Foundation accepted the proposal for the RTP Project. RTP stands for Runtime Packaging.  And here’s what it’s all about.

Marcus Baker wrote an article called “Install Me“, which was published in the book “97 things a programmer should know“. On two pages he shows the reader exactly how important the first minutes are when a new user tries to get familiar with your software. He argues that it is the responsibility of  the software developer, to make it as easy as possible for the user to see that your software is what he needs.

Currently we don’t do a good job with this at EclipseRT. There are several EclipseRT technologies out there and every one provides an individual starting point for new users. From my point of view, changing this would bring EclipseRT a big step further.

That’s the inspiration behind the RTP project.  All that a user should have to do is download – install – run. The idea is to create one or more common starting points that new users can use to get familiar with EclipseRT technology.  Once we have the installation accomplished, we’ll have to convince the user with good examples and documentation. Investigation shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. If the user doesn’t see what he needs in his first five minutes, the software will not get a second chance. There is also the chance of course, that the annoyed user might spread the word that the software doesn’t do the job right.  So, its definitely worthwhile to invest in keeping new users happy.

And this is what RTP is all about:  working with as many EclipseRT projects as possible to provide a really good out-of-the box experience for new users. If you are interested in this project please let me know. We welcome all help towards succeeding with RTP. If you want to learn more about RTP there are also two EclipseCon 2011 submissions (submission 1, submission 2) you can read.

Tags: BIRT, ecf, eclipse, eclipseRT, emf, epp, equinox, ercp, OSGi, p2, rap, riena, swordfish

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

The second milestone (M2) of next years’ Eclipse Simultaneous Release called Helios is now available!

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!

Tags: epp, helios, milestone

Only 4 days until the final Galileo SR1 bits are going to be released on Friday, time to write about some good news:

First of all, there is bug 281501 “64 bit Cocoa EPP packages should be available” which is currently the most wanted bug at Eclipse. I never thought that I would ever be the one who owns the bug with the highest number of votes, but finally it is solved and 64-bit Cocoa packages will be available with Galileo SR1. If you have a Mac and if you are able to run these packages, download one of the 20090920-1025 builds, test it and report on the above bug. I would be thankful for additional testing because I am lacking the possibility to test on this platform.

Another great achievement is the ability to upgrade the packages with the help of p2. This morning I tested to upgrade several Galileo packages to the new service release and it worked very well! Look at the About Dialog of the RCP package before the upgrade  – I started with a pristine download from eclipse.org/downloads:

Then I had to modify the URLs of the p2 repositories in Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites – see the screenshot below. Note that this step is only required until the final bits are released, because they are only available from a temporary location at the moment. After the release nobody has to change anything here, especially the EPP repository URL is only temporary for build 241.

The last step is the update itself (Help > Check for Updates). This takes some time, but at the end I could restart my Eclipse RCP package and it started with the new Galileo SR1 version:

I am happy to see this working!

Tags: epp, galileo, p2

Finally I’m happy to announce the long expected extension of the EPP Wizard for proxies. Now the EPP Wizard provides an extended P2 installer which allows you to edit the proxy-related settings. The extended P2 installer has a dialog where you can select a proxy and enter the credentials for it. This feature should be used in cases where the proxy needs full authentication (user name and password). For all other use cases, the P2 installer works fine. The new dialog looks very similar to the dialog “Edit Proxy Entry” on the “Network Connections” preference page of Eclipse. The proxy support is already contributed to the P2 installer with the following bug.

To use the new proxy functionality select the check box “use manual proxy settings”.

Extended P2 Installer

Than the “Settings…” button is activated. Select this button to open the proxy dialog. On the dialog page you can select a proxy schema and enter all needed information for it.

Proxy Settings Dialog

If you encounter problems or have any ideas how to improve the functionality, please don’t be shy and send us suggestions through our feedback form on our download site.

Tags: epp, galileo, p2

Previously, I blogged about the current state of the Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP) Wizard. I have good news, the EPP wizard is now officially available.

The wizard has been embedded in our own company download site under the Customize Download button. If you start on the Eclipse Foundation download site and chose to download your packages from EclipseSource, you have the option to download an unmodified package from the Cloud but also the possibility to use the EPP Wizard to create your own download. If you select the latter option, the wizard will be opened with the package content you already selected on the Eclipse download site. If you are satisfied with your selection just go to the finish page of the wizard and select the packages you want to install.

Can you spot the difference in the screenshots bellow?

Install new Software Dialog with Update Site Management

Install new Software Dialog without Update Site Management

We found out that some installations created with the EPP Wizard don’t have the p2 UI for management of repositories (update sites). The available update sites are shown under Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites and under Help > Install New Software… but you don’t have the possibility to edit them. This issue was fixed last week but if you have an older installation and the update sites management functionalty is missing you have to change the start options of the bundle org.eclipse.equinox.ds to get it. The start options associated with bundles are saved into the bundles.info located under eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator/bundles.info (in this case eclipse is the directory of your eclipse installation). Just change the start options of the bundle org.eclipse.equinox.ds from “4, false” to “2, true” and restart your eclipse.

The EPP Download Wizard integrates Yoxos OnDemand as external service provider. Yoxos OnDemand is a free Eclipse download and update service we provide. Yoxos OnDemand provides access to additional third party content which is not available from the EPP Wizard. However, from the EPP Wizard, you can continue your download with Yoxos without losing time because your selection will be sent to Yoxos.

If you encounter other problems or have ideas how to improve the wizard please send us feedback through our feedback form on our download site.

Tags: epp, galileo, p2

Twenty-four hours after opening the flood gates and releasing Galileo I thought I could provide some statistics. Over a year ago I started one of my talks at EclipseCon announcing that every 3 seconds someone starts a download of a packages that we create in my Eclipse Packaging Project.

But everything is different in the first few days after a release. When I checked the download page and the download counter I calculated that there were about 100000 downloads of the packages (including the ‘classic’ SDK). This means that every 0.9 seconds a package has been downloaded! Cool. Just a few more numbers:

• Java EE package with more than 50000 downloads so far
• Total amount of data (all packages): More than 15 TBytes (15000 GBytes!)
• Average bandwidth necessary to serve this data: 1600 MBits/s

Then I checked the logfiles of our own EclipseSource servers. In addition to our download mirrors we decided this year to provide package downloads from the Cloud. Maybe you have seen then new download links to Eclipse members on the download page:

If you choose our “Get It Faster Here” offering you are downloading the packages from Amazon Cloud Front. It is hard to say how many people were using this service in the first 24 hours, because many people were using download managers (something that prevents me from providing exact numbers based on the logfiles). But what I can provide here is a statistic about the download speed in MBits per second:

You can see that most people are sitting behind Internet connections that can deliver 5 to 20 MBits/s, but some have really fast pipes. For example, I was testing our downloads from a large research facility here in Germany and I got a download speed of more than 280 MBits/s!

I think that’s great. You don’t have to wait for downloads any more!

Tags: eclipse, epp, galileo, p2

The EPP Wizard is now available as a preview from our website: http://epp.eclipsesource.com.

The idea behind the EPP Wizard is to simplify the installation process of dynamic downloads. With the EPP Wizard, you can easily choose what you want to include in your Eclipse installation and install this selection.

The wizard itself consists of four pages. The first three pages contain the components that can be installed and the last page provides a configured p2 installer to install the selected components. To navigate through the pages of the EPP Wizard, use the buttons placed on the bottom of each wizard page:

EPP Wizard Navigation

The first page of the EPP Wizard contains downloads for Java, Java EE, RCP, C/C++ and Dynamic Languages. You can select a main group or expand it and select more specific subcomponents of this group (e.g., the Java group contains subcomponents for Java and mobile Java development).

EPP Wizard Navigation

The selected components are then displayed on the right of the page under ‘My Selection. The second page of the wizard contains downloads for DataBase Development, Mobile Device Development, Modeling and SOA Development. The last page of the wizard provides different tools. We were not sure how to arrange the downloads so we decided on the first page to place the programming language extensions of Eclipse. On the second page, the more abstract extensions and on the third page the various tools. Feedback about the arrangement of the downloads would be appreciated.

On the last page of the EPP Wizard, you can choose how to install your selection. Currently, there are two possibilities, both of them use the P2 Installer. The P2 Installer can be launched as Java Web Start application or you can download the P2 Installer and start it from your local machine. The provided P2 Installer is already configured with a set of p2 repositories and your selection list, and you only need to select the install location. The last wizard page contains also a section with external download providers. From this section you will be able to choose an external download provider and you will be redirected to the site of the selected external download provider. Your available selection will be transfered to the chosen external download provider. So you don’t need to select the already selected downloads again and can continue with your download.

EPP Wizard Navigation

Note that the P2 Installer fails sometimes to instal selected components. There is bug 280205 open that covers this issue. The problem happens when p2 repositories are used which contain compressed artifacts and the selected download is very large.

Enjoy.

So don’t wait, try it now! Feedback is welcome!

Tags: epp, galileo, p2

Good news, Galileo RC4 is out and available for download.

Why is this good news? Well, if we look at the Galileo calendar, Galileo GA’s next week!

If you want to get Galileo a bit faster, I highly recommend supporting Eclipse development by becoming a Friend of Eclipse. By donating a bit of money, you get access to Galileo earlier and you get access to a faster download mirror. Note that you can use this mirror for other Eclipse releases, including when Eclipse starts releasing 3.6 milestones. I personally find the mirror worth the small donation. I’m able to get my integration builds much faster than usual

If you like to blog, the Eclipse Foundation is hosting a Galileo blog-a-thon. The rules are simple, blog about Galileo and get your choice of a ‘Friend of Eclipse’ membership, a customized t-shirt or a golf shirt. If your blog entry happens to be really good, you have a chance at winning an Eclipse jacket and a full pass to EclipseCon 2010 or Eclipse Summit Europe 2009.

If you’re into Twitter, become part of the Twitterati that are following the Galileo release!

There will also be a virtual conference entitled Galileo in Action. There will be talks about Mylyn, ECF, p2 and more!

If you want to learn more about the Galileo release, I highly suggest you register and attend.

Other than that, enjoy Galileo!

Tags: epp, galileo