On Tuesday, Pascal and I presented “p2, your savior or your achilles heel? Everything an Eclipse team needs to know about p2” where we talked about the 10 most common pitfalls developers face when using p2. More importantly, we talked about how you can avoid them.
For those of you who attended the talk, thank-you. I hope you learned something. For those of you who could not attend, I’ve attached the slides here.
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.
If anybody is going to be in Dublin next Thursday (Sept 9th), I’ll be talking about OSGi, Software Modularity and Single Sourcing. Details of the event can be found here. If anybody is going to be in the area, let me know. I’d love to catch up with some Eclipse folks over a few frosty beverages.
Please note: This post is outdated. Please read this post and do not follow the install instructions in this one.
A few weeks ago I presented you my GSoC 2010 project. The idea was to make Equinox/RAP WAR deployment easier. And yes, it was a real pain to create .war files for an Equinox/RAP application. About 215 deployment related threads on the RAP newsgroup speak for themselves. But the pain is over now, and I think I can say, “Mission accomplished”.
I want to introduce you to a new concept called WAR Products. They are similar to Eclipse Products but much more lightweight. All you have to do to export a RAP application is to create a .warproduct based on a working launch configuration and press ‘export’. The exported .war file is ready to deploy. There is a function included that validates your .war file content before you’ve exported it. If you don’t believe me, watch the screencast below and see for yourself.
You can use the tooling right now, but please keep in mind that we are still polishing. The final goal is to contribute it back to PDE, but there are still a few things to do before we make the contribution. One of those items is to get your initial feedback so when you use the WAR Products tooling, please be sure submit your feature requests or file bugs and help us to continue to improve the tooling.
Here is what you need to do to use the WAR Products tooling:
Again, comments, bugs and feature requests are appreciated!
At this point I want to thank some people. First of all, Rüdiger Herrmann for great mentoring and the whole RAP team for all the nice evenings in the beer garden. Not to forget Simon Kaegi, Scott Lewis and Chris Aniszczyk and the rest of the Equinox and PDE teams for tuning up the Product concept. Your changes made things much easier.
And, I hope that you will find WAR deployment and creating WAR Products not just easier, but completely pain free!
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a reminder, OSGi DevCon London happens tomorrow, February 23rd. If you want to learn about OSGi from the experts and live in the area, I highly recommend you visit.
I’m personally excited about Kirk Knoernschild’s keynote about OSGi in the Enterprise: Agility, Modularity and Architecture’s Paradox. You can view the full program here.
I will be speaking about Eclipse, OSGi and API Evolution and also will be participating in the spicy OSGi Development Tooling Panel. As always, if you want to chat about Eclipse, OSGi or open source over frosty beverages… feel free to find me.
If you want to follow via Twitter, there are two tags you should pay attention to: #jaxlondon and #osgidclon
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
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.
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