As I described in a previous blog I’m going to create the tooling for creating equinox based war files within this year’s gsoc. For this purpose I created some UI sketches with the WireframeSketcher. You can see the first thoughts on the UI below. I would appreciate if you can give some feedback on the sketches to improve the tooling. You can find more information about the war products at the wiki page.

• the new wizard

• the warproduct editor

• the export wizard

Tags: eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi, rap, soc, war deployment

I finally had the time to care about one of my outstanding tasks – provide a tutorial and example how to use Equinox Security. While the tutorial was initially targeted for RAP users, I also added a launch config and a target definition for RCP as the code is the same for both runtimes. The tutorial will provide some hints and pointers how to setup your login procedure, like shown below:

After logging in (hint, hint), you’re able to inspect the currently active Subject. I made up this example to be as simple as possible to demonstrate the key concepts of Equinox Security, and not the ones from RAP/RCP.

As I said, you can either choose between RAP as runtime (above) or RCP (below).

In addition to the authentication mechanism, I wrote a pretty simple LoginModule to show how to connect your authentication process to an alternative backend (eg. LDAP, Kerberos, …).

As I put the tutorial into the Eclipse wiki, I encourage everyone to extend the tutorial with hints, tricks or ideas what you can do with Equinox Security. Hope the tutorial helps to get up to speed how to use secure your RCP/RAP applications.

Tags: eclipseRT, equinox, jaas, rap, rcp, security, Single Sourcing

Finally the voting process for this years Google Summer of Code is over and they announced the accepted students. I’m really happy that so many interesting proposals got trough and really looking forward to see the outcome of all the student projects.

Here is the full list of the proposals that got accepted for 2010.
Improve Eclipse Git integration
Student: Dariusz Luksza
Mentor(s): Matthias Sohn

WAR deployment for RAP/Equinox based applications
Student: Holger Staudacher
Mentor(s): Ruediger Herrmann

Theme editor for RAP
Student: Benjamin Muskalla (IRC: benny`work)
Mentor(s): Ruediger Herrmann

Rich Editor For Wiki Markup
Student: Harshana Eranga Martin
Mentor(s): David Green

index based model compare match engine
Student: Stefan Leopold
Mentor(s): Cedric Brun

Restlet integration with Equinox
Student: Rajeev Sampath
Mentor(s): Bryan Hunt

C++ editor enhancements
Student: Tomasz Wesolowski
Mentor(s): Alena Laskavaia

DNS-SD based wide-area ECF discovery provider
Student: Markus Alexander Kuppe (IRC: lemmy)
Mentor(s): Scott Lewis

Hudson Integration for Mylyn
Student: Markus Knittig
Mentor(s): Steffen Pingel

Google Wave ECF provider
Student: Sebastian Schmidt (IRC: sebs)
Mentor(s): Mustafa Isik

Integrate GMF runtime with Mylyn task focused UI
Student: Yongming Luo
Mentor(s): Mariot Chauvin

Congratulations to all the students and a big kudos to the organizers and mentors for their choice. As every year, it is pretty difficult to dismiss so many other good proposals but there were only 11 slots available this year for Eclipse. Looking forward to a great summer!

Tags: ecf, egit, emf, equinox, gmf, google summer of code, hudson, mylyn, rap, restlet, wave

Ever been to Mannheim? If not – this is your chance to visit this lovely city. For the Helios release, the guys behind the majug² (Mannheimer Java user Group) invite everybody to the Helios Democamp in June. And as Ian already found out: Yes, we love our DemoCamps! It’s always great to have technical discussions over a frosty beverage!

Watertower by flamouroux

At the moment, the attendee list is still pretty empty but save yourself a seat while it’s not booked out – they only have 100 seats available. Topics this year include EGit, EclipseRT, Android and Roo. Do you think a cool topic is missing? Step up and give a demo about what you’re doing! I’m really looking forward to see more demos of how people use Eclipse as IDE or runtime.

Hope to see you there for another great DemoCamp and ad-hoc Stammtisch!

Tags: android, democamp, eclipseRT, egit, equinox, git, helios, roo, talks

Even though I’ve been involved in the Eclipse community for around 5 years, I’m still amazed by the projects that are hosted under the Eclipse umbrella. As an “insider”, I have a pretty good overview of many projects and at least a rough picture of all the other cool stuff. While I love working with EclipseRT technologies like Equinox, RAP, EclipseLink, ECF or <insert your project here>, I always find myself in the same situation.  This stuff is awesome but do users really get the point of what’s possible? Learning a new technology is always hard, but if you want to develop enterprise-ready, scalable and vibrant platforms using Eclipse components, there are so many obstacles to overcome. You need to have at least a clue about OSGi/Equinox, Extensions and their corresponding Extension points (for each for your consumed modules) and many other things. I don’t want to say that Eclipse is too complicated (which is a topic for another post anyway), but what I would really like to see is a better way to get our future consumers up to speed. As Esther Dyson once said:

A worker’s paradise is a consumer’s hell.

With the Eclipse Examples project we wanted to provide a few exemplary projects to show how to use different projects. In theory a nice idea, but practically I don’t see that this effort was very successful. Wayne and me discussed some ideas back in 2008 but without a concrete outcome.  Thinking about this topic after EclipseCon, my current thought was to provide easy ways for our consumers to try out the bits and pieces of all the projects. What I constantly run into though, is that you need to do so many things  before you can get started, like setting up a target platform, making your examples depend on the right bundles, using the right extension points/services/etc, creating launch configurations. Many projects already helped themselves by providing examples using PDE templates. That’s the way I’d like to tell newcomers how to get started and would push this even a little further – the idea is to provide some infrastructure in the Examples project to help others setting up their examples. The projects just provide example bundles, maybe a target definition, a launch configuration and a cheatsheet or something. In the end, the user should be able to try out another Eclipse technology within 2 clicks: New Example > That technology, run!

Basically PDE already provides many of these things but it’s not yet at the point I would love to see it. It’s still too complex for consumers to create target platforms (I know what I’m talking about), create their launch configs and get started with the examples. While there are still some hurdles to jump, I think our users and consumers would thank us for getting them up to speed in seconds. It should even be interesting for non-OSGi related examples as other projects thought about something like this for years. I don’t see a chance to have this ready for Helios, but I’m pretty confident that we could do something like this in the timeframe for the I… release train. Would other projects be interested in such an approach to distribute their examples? Please leave a comment on this bug if you do so to collect ideas, wishes and requirements.

Tags: consumers, eclipseRT, equinox, examples, OSGi, p2, pde, rap

This year’s Summer of Code application deadline has passed. I want to take the chance and introduce you to my planned project. I think the results will be a great benefit for the community. So, what does RAP/Equinox WAR products mean?

When searching the RAP newsgroup for “WAR deployment” 210 threads appear. The reason for this is that many developers have problems deploying a RAP application. These problems exist because RAP products build on top of Server-Side Equinox. Equinox has special requirements for the deployable archive. To making things easier for beginners and to simplify the deployment process a good approach and tooling is needed. The goal of this GSoC 2010 project is to provide this approach and tooling.

The planned approach is called WAR products. This should be a similar concept as the well known Eclipse product approach to make RCP developers feel at home. The tooling for the WAR products should also be very similar to the existing product tooling. I already talked to Chris Aniszczyk about this project and we both agree not to create a whole new tooling for the WAR products. I think it would be the best to make the existing tooling plugable to reuse most of the components for the WAR product tooling.

How does this fit in the RAP project? Well, I think RAP is probably the biggest consumer of the Server-Side Equinox technology. With this fact it’s in the interest of the RAP community to have a good concept and tooling for users. While doing this project as part of RAP we can easily get feedback from the community. Rüdiger Herrmann, co-lead of the RAP project, already agreed to mentor this GSoC project.

So, wouldn’t it be great to have such a tooling for WAR products? With this kind of tooling we can handle the deployment of Server-Side Equinox based applications the same way as normal RCP applications. The only problem at this point is the project needs to be accepted for GSoC 2010. So, my call to all accepted mentors: Please give the project a good vote. The full project’s proposal can be found at the Eclipse Wiki (Maybe you have some good ideas you want to share?). Thanks in advance for all votes.

Tags: equinox, rap, soc

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

Yup, that could be you. On your boat, cruising past Saba Rock in the British Virgin Islands, learning Eclipse RCP or Equinox/OSGi.

Twice a year the Eclipse Foundation runs the Eclipse Training Series and the Spring ’10 sessions were announced earlier today. The series has always been a great opportunity for the community to learn more about the technologies they are (or should be) using.

This year EclipseSource is very pleased to announce that we are offering a number of courses in a “virtual classroom” format. Over the past few months we have tried out this idea and found that it has worked quite well.  The courses are run largely in the same sequence as in-person classes using the same materials but using screen sharing and web conferencing facilities. Despite the lack of personal contact, participants report a solid learning experience and very much appreciate not having to travel.

We are also expanding our virtual offerings into our RAP, p2 and PDE build courses. Of course, we continue to provied in-person classes. Check out the full Eclipse training lineup.

Tags: eclipse, equinox, OSGi, training

Earlier today we released a new version of the sample code for the OSGi and Equinox book. This new version has many updates to the Samples Manager itself as well as updated code for several chapters. Check out all the details on the book blog.

We have also added the ability to download the whole Samples Manager software site as a zip.  See the downloads page for more details on how to get the samples.

Finally, we’ve added forums to the book site and encourage readers to share their experiences, questions and discoveries.

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate

Finally! Moments ago I received my personal copy of the new OSGi and Equinox book!

More than a year in the making it is very gratifying to finally have the physical book. The cover looks great and the production team did a good job of the layout.

To celebrate I updated the book website a bit to have forums and a few other things. More will come in the next few days including a teaser chapter and the table of contents. Some people have asked for the samples in a zip file so we’ll put that together as well.  Stay tuned.

Of course, if you just can’t wait and want to get the book now, you can
buy it now. Note that Amazon thinks that it is still coming but I’m assured that it is indeed in-stock so ordering now will get it to you shortly. Enjoy.

Finally, for those of you taking a wait and see approach, we are planning to give a few away at our EclipseCon tutorial…  The tutorial will use material from the book giving you a great opportunity to get a quick start and then dive deep and explore more by reading the book afterwards.  See you there.

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate