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

Here’s a gentle reminder that OSGi DevCon London 2010 is happening in a few weeks.

I highly recommend registering if you’re interested in OSGi. There will be people from all over the OSGi community including some great tutorials. I’ll be giving a talk regarding OSGi and API evolution… with some stories of how we handle the problem at Eclipse, how it’s handled elsewhere and what are the gaps. I’m also excited about the OSGi Development Tooling Panel that Christian Dupuis, Peter Kriens, David Savage, Toni Menzel and I will be hosting. If you were looking at a time to connect (or praiseand lambast us) with some of the OSGi Tooling folks, this would be a good time. We’re hoping for a lively and friendly discussion.

Feel free to check out the schedule online for the full listing of talks and tutorials.

I hope to see you there.

Tags: OSGi

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

Today, the Eclipse Foundation announced two new projects at Eclipse.org, Graphiti and Virgo.

The Graphiti project aims to offer an Eclipse-based graphics framework to enable easy development of state-of-the-art diagram editors for domain models. SAP plans to contribute the developed framework. This could have a large impact in the Eclipse Modeling space where graphic modeling is only getting better and better. The contribution is also important because SAP is showing that it’s strongly committed to the Eclipse ecosystem.

The Virgo project will provide a runtime platform for the development of server-side enterprise applications built on top of Equinox, and optionally using modules from the Gemini project. On top of that, the Virgo project solidifies the EclipseRT vision that a lot of us have been preaching for awhile.

Want to learn more about EclipseRT? Check out the whitepaper.

Another thing to note about the Virgo project is that tooling will be coming along but contributed to specific projects at Eclipse.

Developer tools that provide support for Virgo are out of scope for the Virgo project as part of EclipseRT. However, the Virgo team also propose to work with the existing WTP and PDE projects to contribute relevant developer tools for Virgo to those projects. These contributions will be based upon the existing Bundlor and dm Server development tools projects detailed below.

So far, it looks like three out of twelve zodiac signs are taken for OSGi related projects.

Which one will be next ?

Tags: eclipse, gemini, OSGi, virgo

On December 14, 2009, the Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar that will include speakers from Cisco, Morgan Stanley and eBay discussing deploying Eclipse to thousands, and even tens of thousands, of their developers.

Here’s the breakdown of the schedule…

• Dennis Vaughn, Cisco
  • Scalability (65k + source files)
  • Diverse Deployments (geographically, NFS, OS/Versions)
  • Engineering Environment Diversity (legacy tools, acquisitions)
  • Working Culture (curmudgeons versus new hires, ROI versus VI/Emacs)
• Miles Daffin, Morgan Stanley
  • Enterprise Constraints and their Consequences for Eclipse Provisioning
  • Next Steps: Further Reduce Total Cost of Ownership and Provide more Useful Features as Needed
• Joep Rottinghuis, eBay
  • Scalability (100k + source files)
  • Deployment (individualized workspaces)
  • Usage Tracking (who is using what, and what issues are in what versions)
  • Manifest Maintenance (OSGi bundle/package versions)

Please register via email if you’re interested.

Tags: eclipse, OSGi

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

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

Lately I have been working on (and committing) a repository analyzer tool for p2.  It is meant to help you validate your repository against known problems and common mistakes (missing version numbers, two IUs with the same ID/Version, etc…).  After cleaning up the code I finally committed it.  Within a few minutes of committing it, Andrew starting pinging me to let me know I introduced a compile error. (Thanks Andrew).

The offending lines where here:

and more precisely:

You see, while this may seem fine to all you Java 1.6 developers out there, p2 is set to run on CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1 and JSE-1.4.  I know in the Java SE space, 1.4 is long past end of life, but in the embedded space, it is still very common.  (Remember, these embedded devices require much smaller VMs, otherwise we complain that our small devices are two slow /sluggish / expensive, etc…) — and p2 is a provisioning platform that operates just fine on embedded devices.

With Eclipse, you can set your Execution Environment (EE) and point to a variety of JDKs.  This allows you to “single source” your code so the same code can run on a server with Java 1.6 installed and a small device with a Foundation VM.  However, I don’t have a Foundation VM .

Lucky for us, an EE description for several JDKs is available in the Eclipse CVS repository:

Once you checkout the project, you can add this to your list of known JREs

Now I get all the Java tooling (content assist, compile errors, etc…) for the Foundation 1.1 VMs.

Tags: OSGi, pde, tips