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.
My highlights on the EclipseCon today were the EMF GWT presentation by Ed Merks, the p2 talk by Ian Bull and Pascal Rapicault and the keynote on Watson by David Gondek:
Ed Merks showed how to use EMF with the Google Web Toolkit. In about a click or two, he had an EMF-based GWT application (or an GWT-based EMF application) up and running. The famous library model application was not only available locally on his demo laptop but also hosted on Google Appspot. It is still available here. Unfortunately Ed did not refresh his running browser instance during the tutorial, although many model updates had been waiting on the server…;)
Ian Bull and Pascal Rapicault presented a bunch of donts concerning p2 in a very entertaining way. I hereby promise, I will no longer unzip features and plugins directly into an Eclipse instance, I will never release with the same version twice or try to edit the p2 metadata 
. Also throwing in 1000+ plugins into the dropin folder seems to be a discouraged practice, at least if you would like to have a speedy Eclipse startup. Seriously, this was a very informative presentation and it showed how to avoid “trouble” with p2, which is in many cases trouble that we caused ourselves.
In his keynote David Gondek explained the mission of Watson and how it works. Today keyword search is widely used, but it comes with the disadvantage of putting the burden of selecting “good” keywords on the user. In general adding more keywords to a search will decrease the quality of the results. Among many interesting statistics, I found the statistics on the top 10 “What is …?” searches in Google particularly interesting. On the first place is the question “What is love?”. Consequently the question “What is autism?” is on the 7th place . In contrast to keyword search, Watson uses a comprehensive analysis and reasoning to answer natural language questions. For example Watson has a geographic reasoner which can relate words in terms of the geographic distance. Thereby Watson can even find answers to tricky questions in Jeopardy. The many examples in the keynote provided a lively picture of the problems building the next generation search engine.
Over the last few days I’ve read many blogs from folks who are speaking at EclipseCon next week in Santa Clara. Everytime I find it really interesting to hear about the ideas behind the talks. So, with this post I want to show you what you can expect from the EclipseSource folks at EclipseCon.
First we’ll have a chance to meet every morning. EclipseSource is the activity sponsor again this year. What does this mean? This means that the first 50 people will get a cool running shirt and everyone will get the opportunity to meet Eclipse committers away from the conference stress. After the jogging you won’t have to wait long to hear from us again.
The first event is on Tuesday at 2:00 pm. You can meet Ian Bull and listen to him speaking about growing an open source project. He will show you how easy it is to get in touch with your favorite open source project by contributing to it. He will demo how to overcome the major hurdles to becoming a first class contributor.
If you can’t get enough of Ian you will have a second chance to listen to him after a short break. On Tuesday at 4:00 pm he will show you everything you need to know about p2 together with Kim Moir and Pascal Rapicault. They will show you how to get around the biggest pain points in p2 and pointers for best practices.
If p2 is not your favorite topic and you want to go deep into some hardcore stuff, then I recommend attending Johannes Eickhold’s talk. It’s in the same slot as the p2 talk and is entitled, “Sovereign: Migrating Java Threads to Improve Availability of Web Applications“. Johannes will describe two technical strategies on how to improve availability in RAP, a very interesting problem with big implications for RAP.
Because EclipseCon is full of good talks, you don’t have to wait long for the next one. Take a look ahead at RAP together with Ralf Sternberg at 4:30 pm. He will take you on a tour inside our plans with RAP and show some really cool demos. This talk also marks the end of this packed Tuesday for us.
But luckily the Wednesday is not far away. Meet Ian again at 5:30 pm . He will show you some really cool demos on the hot new products showcase reception. This is a great opportunity to go into detail together with Ian.
After meeting Ian again you can take a break from us. But, only until 7:30 pm. Ralf will moderate the RAP BoF and right after this you can join me on the RTP BoF. The BoFs will give us a full hour to propose ideas and discuss concepts or internals. So, don’t miss them.
Because RTP is a hot new Eclipse Project , in addition to the BoF, you will also have the chance to attend a presentation by me on Thursday 2:30 pm. As you might already know, we created the RTP project to enable more developers to use EclipseRT. In my talk, “Eclipse Runtimes out of the Box“, you can hearing everything there is to know about RTP in 20 minutes.
In addition to this schedule there is more. Of course, you will find all of us at the Hyatt every evening . I’m really looking forward to meeting you there…
A few weeks ago I told you about the Eclipse RTP project. Since then some things happened that I want to share with you.
First of all, we made it to the creation review. The review is scheduled for January 12-19. The community gathering period was very successful. We reached 10 interested parties and 7 initial committers from three different companies. In this article, I’d like to focus on one very cool thing. It’s the effort made by SAP.
As you might have seen in the last months, SAP is involved in more than the half of the new Eclipse projects. Probably the main reason behind this is that SAP submitted the most project proposals . But reading about it and getting in touch with the guys behind this company are two different things as we learned in the RTP project. So, let’s review the SAP + RTP story:
In December a colleague of mine, Florian Waibel, made his way through closed airports and meters of snow to South Hampton, UK to have a face-to-face meeting with the Virgo guys. During this meeting he also talked about RTP and gained some interest from some of the people there. Back home he told me about SAP getting heavily involved in Virgo and also about their interest in RTP. Because we are an open Eclipse project we got in touch with a friendly SAP project manager (thanks Krassi) and had discussions about the RTP project and how an internal development project from SAP could fit into RTP. Well, the result was that SAP was so interested that we extended the scope of the project together and will now receive an initial contribution from SAP called the “p2 installer”. Of course, Eclipse is not a software dumping area. That’s why they will provide a maintainer for this contribution who will also be an initial committer. Welcome Georgi Stanev .
The “p2 installer” is basically a command line interface for the official p2 installer to manage remote Eclipse runtime installations. The purpose of this tool was to enable automated scripts to install Eclipse runtime to remote systems. The cool thing about it is the ability to define the units that should be installed in a property file declaratively. Yesterday we had a short demo of the installer and I have to say that it looks very exciting.
To put it all in a nutshell it’s really good to see SAP working actively in and with the open source community. They are not shy about donating things and providing guidance. It’s very nice to see a really big player supporting open source in positive ways.
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.
First, they are all Eclipse projects. But I think you already knew this. The second thing they have in common is that they are all part of the Eclipse Stammtisch on September 15th in Karlsruhe (Germany). It’s an honor to announce that all these projects will be presented by top developers who play an important role in their projects. I would believe that until the Eclipse Summit Europe this will be the last chance to hear this many first class talks. If you are in or around Karlsruhe on September 15th feel free to join us and take the opportunity to see all the mentioned technologies in action.
Who’s speaking at the Stammtisch?
How much does it cost?
What do you have to do to attend the Stammtisch?
I think this will be a unique opportunity to see these talks in the casual atmosphere of a Stammtisch. Thanks in advance to all speakers for agreeing to participate and for making this evening possible. It’s a great honor to have you all in Karlsruhe.
After the talks we will all go over to a small Italian restaurant and talk about the topics over a frosty beverage. You are free to join this round and network with the speakers and audience. If you’re not able to attend the Stammtisch you also have a second chance. I think all of the speakers submitted a proposal for the Eclipse Summit Europe. You can attend this event by following the steps described here.
Looking forward to meeting you at the Stammtisch. I will also be there and try to answer questions about RAP
It’s been overcast and raining here in Victoria B.C. (Canada) over the past 2 weeks. It’s a long way from the dog days of summer, but a good time to focus on docs. In fact, the Eclipse team has been focusing on documentation during this final release candidate. In particular, the p2 team is putting some docs together on our new API (Yes, p2 has “real” API now).
Last year Andrew Niefer gave me a few tips on self-hosting the doc / help contents and I thought I would share these.
The help contents are written in HTML files and live in OSGi bundles (like everything else). For example, the platform doc lives in org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv. Once you have your bundle loaded (from CVS, git, wherever) you can edit the contents like any HTML other document. When you want to see how the contents will appear to the user, simple launch the org.eclipse.help.base.infocenterApplication, and specify a port as a VM argument (-Dserver_port=4419 for example).
Once running, you can now browse the help contents using your favorite browser (and even change the contents on the fly).
Of course if we get our butts in gear and follow David Green’s advice, we won’t need to edit our docs this way.
At EclipseCon I had the pleasure of presenting an introductory tutorial on p2 with an awesome co-presenter Kim Moir.
The tutorial went well, although we did have a few technical problems at the beginning. We knew there was way too much material to cover in a 3 hour tutorial, and if we started cutting it down then we wouldn’t get to the advanced material (which 1/2 the people want to see). If we started with the advanced material then we would loose the other half of the audience. So either way, 1/2 of the room will be disappointed. 
We decided to shoot somewhere in the middle and make the tutorial available as an Eclipse plug-in. This way, if you need a little more time, you could work through it at your own pace. If you are a p2 wiz, then you could whip ahead and take an early lunch.
If you couldn’t make the tutorial, the plug-in is available here as a p2 repository. The tutorial was designed to work with Eclipse 3.6 M6, so you will likely have to download that version of Eclipse. Once you have Eclipse 3.6 M6, simply open Help->Install New Software…
Once installed, you can open the view called RCP Book Samples Manager (our plug-in was based on the famous samples manager from the Eclipse RCP Book).
You can use the samples manager to move between the different parts of the tutorial. You can even compare the solution to the start to see exactly what you have to do for each task.
If you have questions or feedback on the tutorial, please don’t hesitate to contact me at irbull (at) eclipsesource (dot) com.
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.
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.
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