If you use Eclipse to develop OSGi based applications you may use the OSGi Launcher provided by the PDE Tooling. It’s cool tooling because it gives you full control over the OSGi instance to be launched.  You can choose the OSGi framework (e.g. Equinox or Felix), select the bundles to install and much more.

But this launcher has one drawback that hurts every time I run across it. It appears when an OSGi application uses the OSGi HttpService. When you used this service you may have configured a port for it via the property “org.osgi.service.http.port” VM Argument.  I use this configuration all the time.

When I launch the application everything works fine the first time. But, during development I often come to the point where I need to relaunch the application. When I forget to kill the previous running instance I get a java.net.BindException because the address is already in use. So, to fix this I have to kill both instances and launch it again. This happens to me a lot just because I forget to terminate the previous instance. Of course this isn’t a bug because it’s often useful to launch a second instance of the same configuration. But, not when it comes to developing with the HttpService.

There is a fix now (though not necessarily for my forgetfulness ).  Luckily we live in a modular world in Eclipse. As a result, I was able to develop a separate bundle called the “OSGi Eliminator” (what a descriptive name ). The bundle contributes the functionality to automatically terminate a running OSGi Instance when you try to launch the same instance a second time. This functionality already existed in the RAP launcher created by Rüdiger Hermann. All I did was to refactor the functionality out to make it run in a separate bundle and contribute to the OSGi Launcher instead of the RAP Launcher. This solves an annoying problem for me – maybe for you as well?

You can find this bundle on GitHub. I also created a p2 repository that lets you install the OSGi Eliminator directly into Eclipse.

• p2 repository: http://hstaudacher.github.com/OSGi-launcher-enhancements/
• git repository on GitHub: https://github.com/hstaudacher/OSGi-launcher-enhancements

Tags: equinox, felix, GitHub, httpservice, OSGi, pde, rap, rtp

Today I did a talk at the EclipseCon 2011 which was entitled “Eclipse Runtime out-of-the-box“. With this talk I introduced the EclipseRTP project. So, if you missed it here are the slides

Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, eclipseRT, rtp

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…

Tags: eclipsecon, p2, rap, rtp, sovereign, yoxos

Yesterday Amazon launched a new service called AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It’s basically a Tomcat hosting service. You can upload your WAR files via a web interface, to an instance of a Linux cloud image pre-configured with Tomcat. This is from the official Amazon description:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an even easier way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is easy to begin and impossible to outgrow.

So, as an Eclipse guy the first question that comes to mind is, “Does OSGi/Equinox run on this?” I mean, it definitely should because we have the great Server-Side Equinox technology which we can deploy in a WAR file. So, I did a little experiment which everyone can repeat on his own. It took only 5 minutes to confirm that Equinox can run on Amazon’s Beanstalk. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Server-Side Equinox Application and package it into a WAR file. If you want to use an existing file I recommend that you download the rapdemo.war from the RAP Examples Demo. RAP Applications are basically Server-Side Equinox Applications with a UI.
2. Create an AWS Account and activate AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Follow the steps described in the AWS Management console.
3. Use the Web Interface to upload your example war archive. Don’t forget to check “Launch a new environment running this Application”.
4. After the upload is successful you have to wait a few minutes until the instance is started. When this is finished your application will be online and reachable under name-of-your-application.beanstalk.com. The example I deployed can be reached using this URL: http://eclipserap.elasticbeanstalk.com/

It was highly likely that Equinox was going to work on the beanstalk. But to be certain it works, is even better.  I can also say that I was really impressed by how easy it is to get a WAR file running on the beanstalk.  Just  two years ago, the only option you had to deploy a WAR file was to rent a (V)Server and set up Tomcat on your own. The question for me  now is how long it will take until the deployment of OSGi bundles will be so easy. Oh wait, there is Eclipse RTP…

Tags: amazon, beanstalk, eclipse, equinox, rap, rtp, server-side, tomcat

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.

Tags: eclipse, indigo, p2, rtp, runtime, sap