If this is not the first post by me that you’re reading, you may know that I try to blog regularly. Previously, I had 2 or 3 private blogs which, you also might know, were not that successful . Since I started at EclipseSource, I publish on our company blog.

Anyway, I started my first blog 5 years ago and used some horrible, long forgotten php software. For my other blogs and the EclipseSource blog, WordPress is used. WordPress is probably the winner when it comes to blogging software. It’s widely accepted and heavily used by thousands of bloggers. While I like WordPress a lot, it has some drawbacks. Currently I’m sitting in the train writing this post and what tool do I use? A simple Text Editor. When I arrive at my company I have to paste this post into our WordPress, do a little formatting and publish it. What I really miss in this workflow with the text editior is the history of the post.

As a developer I like trying out the new stuff. As a result I’ve been using Git for a while now and I’m quite happy with it. I’m also an Eclipse committer and the Eclipse IDE is my home. Thanks to my colleagues I’m quite quick with all the shortcuts in the IDE. So, using the IDE as my blog editor and Git as the version control system (aka. history) would feel quite natural to me. But, how can we do this?

Luckily there is GitHub, probably your choice also for a Git hosting service too. Anyone can create a public Git repository for free. In the same way as WordPress is the winner for blog systems, GitHub is the winner when it comes to Git hosting services. What is less well known is that GitHub provides another service called GitHub pages. With pages you can use a Git repository to publish web contents. All you need to do is create a Git repository with a special naming (your-username.github.com) and everything pushed to this repository will be published under http://your-username.github.com (also good for publishing p2 repositories).

What the GitHub folks have also implemented is a Jekyll integration. Jekyll is a blog system that transforms your articles using static templates. You can add a blog post by adding a text file. After writing your posts, all you have to do is push the files to your GitHub pages repository and GitHub automatically starts the Jekyll transformation to create the blog. Isn’t this awesome? You get a blog system with Git as a history and a web hoster for free – in one provider .

How does Eclipse come into the game? After cloning your repository to a local destination you can use linked workspace resources to edit the blog post in your IDE. All you have to do is create a new project and change the location to your Git repository root (see screenshot below).

After editing your posts you have the option to use EGit (the Eclipse Git Integration) to push your changes to GitHub (don’t forget to share the project). The only piece missing is an Eclipse Jekyll integration (GSoC Students where are you?). With this I mean, when I save or commit a local blog post, it would be nice if a Jekyll transformation could be triggered to provide a local preview of the blog. Currently I do this by executing a command on the shell.

I’ve decided already that when I have to create a new blog I will use this technique. If you are not convinced yet, check out these example blogs which use GitHub and Jekyll.

Tags: Blog, blogging, eclipse, egit, git, GitHub, GitHub Pages, jekyll, soc

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:

1. Install the tooling from this repository into your IDE: http://download.eclipsesource.com/~hstaudacher/warproducts/3.7
2. Set up your target. You need to add RAP 1.4 M5 or the Server-Side Equinox SDK.

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!

Tags: equinox, indigo, OSGi, pde, rap, soc, war deployment

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

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

On Canada’s west coast we have been having an unbelievable summer.

While the sunshine (and the beach) have a tendency to lure me away from my computer, there has been so much Eclipse activity this summer  that it’s challenging to get away.  One of the things I’m most excited about is the Google Summer of Code work going on in Zest.  Zest is my small graph widget toolkit.  Up to now it has been something I’ve worked on in the evenings and weekends.  However, this all changed when not one… but two students signed up to work on Zest.

Mateusz Matela, has ventured into the world of Zest layouts.  I wouldn’t ask my worse enemy to look at the layouts, but Mateusz managed to refactor the entire package, removing much of the dead (and error prone code) and he came out with a much cleaner (and simpler) design.  Mateusz even managed to fix some bugs along the way.  For the rest of the summer, Mateusz will be adding some new widgets to our library, allowing you to expand and explore complex graphs.

Fabian Steeg has be working on a GraphViz to Zest transformation toolkit. Using this toolkit you can write GraphViz and generate Zest diagrams.

This is done by using a GraphViz DSL (thanks to the oAW team for this great work) and set of Java Emitting Templates.  Fabian also has full text editor for GraphViz and custom builder that will generate the equivalent Zest code.

Fabian has also been working on the reverse transformation (Zest to GraphViz).

I’m not sure how Zest ended up with two of the best Summer of Code students, but I’m very excited about the future of the project.

Great work guys!

Tags: gef, soc, zest

20 Eclipse projects were accepted this year for Google Summer of Code and you can see the complete list here:

http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/eclipse

Congratulations to all the students!!!  This year we had close to 100 proposals, and I’m happy to say that many of them were very, very  well thought out, it’s too bad we could not accept more.  I encourage members of the Eclipse community to review the list and see if there are any that peak your interest. While each student has been paired with a mentor, the students should be working with the Eclipse community as a whole.  As Wayne and I chatted at EclipseCon it became clear — The code we get from the students in Great, but getting new students immersed in the Eclipse community is even more valuable.

For students, hopefully we will get them blogging about their work.  If any students (or mentors) wants access to the Eclipse SOC blog, send me a note. Or better yet, file a bug against PlanetEclipse.

Tags: eclipse, soc

Once upon a time a guy named Roy Fielding made his disertation about a design aproach called REST. From this point REST is getting very popular. Many service provider using REST to offer developers access to their services i.e. Twitter, Facebook and so on.

But what is this REST thing? It’s a way to publish web services without any overloaded technology like SOAP for example. Every REST service is available under a unique URL and can accessed by everybody. Mostly it sends a response using XML but this is different from service to service. To get the idea of REST let’s take a look at an example. There is a realy huge REST example out there. Probably you using it every day – it’s called the World Wide Web

Yes, the web is nothing else as an landscape full of REST web services. Mostly the services response are HTML but as I said before the response can vary from service to service.

The special thing about REST is that it uses a very well known technology called HTTP. Fielding was involved in the design of HTTP1.1. So REST is nothing else as a way to use HTTP the right way. The HTTP methods (GET, PUT, DELETE, UPDATE) are used for the interaction. The benefit for us developers is, that we can use any programming language to access such a REST service.

And why does ECF want to kiss REST? As I said before, many providers already provide RESTful interfaces. So if ECF has a common API to access a REST based web service it would be much easier to implement providers for these services. On this point GSoC enters the field.

There is a GSoC project called “REST abstraction for ECF” which is my project for this year. You can read more about this project in my proposal and edit or update ideas. Please feel free to get involved.

The overall goal for this project is to make the Eclipse IDE more social. Sounds terrifying isn’t it? But imagine, you open your workspace and activate a mylyn task which is probably a bug. On the same time the bug id and your name is tweeted on Twitter. So everybody who’s interested in your project can see that you working on a new feature or bug. I think this would be really awesome to improve collaboration. There are many other use cases, if you have any ideas please feel free to add comments. Maybe we can realize it if the project has finished. There is only one hurdle left.

The project has to be nominated. So if you are a mentor for GSoC2009, please vote for this project and on the same time for me. Every vote counts

Thank you all for your interest.

Tags: ecf, eclipse, soc

As everyone should now know, the application process for Google Summer of Code is well underway.  Students are actively putting together their proposals and mentors are busy giving feedback and helping students solidify their ideas.

For those of you who still don’t know what the Google Summer of Code program is, it’s a program put on by Google, in which students are given a stipend to work on open source software.  Eclipse has benefited over the years from great new functionality, exploration of new ideas, and a solid group of students that now understand the Eclipse codebase and processes.

As a former student, I can appreciate how difficult it is to get up-to-speed on an open source project.  Often your good ideas are turned down with statements like “we tried that years ago”, or “that won’t work because of XYZ”.  To help students come up with ideas, many Eclipse enthusiasts have spent sleepless nights putting together our wiki page of ideas.

I’m particularly excited about having somebody extend Zest to include new viewers. Zest is an information visualization toolkit for Eclipse.  Currently it only supports 1 widget, the node-link viewer. I would be great if somebody could contribute new viewers such as Treemaps (nested boxes that can help indicate large areas of a system) or Spacetrees (as you click on nodes, more nodes are presented).  (See the HCIL Lab at Maryland for more great ideas).

It would be really cool to add viewers like this, and then create exemplary tools to demonstrate their use.  For example, we could use a treemap to help locate diskspace issues or a spacetree to help explore p2 repositories.  Browse the wiki, look for ideas, or propose your own.  The deadline is Friday, but if you really want to participate you should have your application in before that.

Tags: soc, zest

This week should be “Go Time” for all students.  This is the week students from across the globe are submitting their applications for Google Summer of Code.   Students, you have until this Friday (April 3rd) to submit your application.  While you may think that’s plenty of time, think again!!!  Some students have already begun submitting their applications, and mentors have already starting reviewing / commenting on them.  If you don’t get your application in early, you are less likely to get any help with it.  (And less likely to find a mentor).  The best advice I can give is to submit early!!!

If you are still looking for ideas, checkout our wiki page.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is a terrific program and it even helped me land a full-time job after graduation.  Internships are great, but Summer of Code will provide you with a portfolio you can present at your next interview.  Just imagine sitting down with a potential employer and faced with the question “What projects have you worked on“?  Imagine being able to say “See that refactoring tool you are using in Eclipse… I wrote that!!!“.  Put that next to the kid who answers… uh… oh… I wrote a bubble sort algorithm in second year that mostly worked.

Google Summer of Code is most definitely For The Win!!!

Tags: eclipse, soc

For those of us in Canada, it can be hard to think about summer.  Even in Victoria we had a late blast of winter, which makes it feel like summer will never come.  However, for open source developers, summer is just around the corner — Summer of Code that is. The Google Summer of Code program provides funds and the infrastructure to enable students to work on open source software from May to August.  This is the 5th year Google is putting on this program and they just opened up the the application for member organizations.  Once again, Eclipse will be applying for participation.

I have been contacted by a number of students with some great ideas, including Fabian Steeg, who wants to bring Graphviz’s DOT language to Zest.  This is a great idea, and will hopefully open the door to end user graph based customization within Eclipse.  

While the student application process has not formally started, I would encourage students to start thinking and preparing their ideas.  As a former student, here are a few tips:

1. Blog — Write about your ideas and get some early feedback
2. Subscribe to the Eclipse SoC mailing list and the Google Summer of Code Group
3. Blog — Write about your experiences with Eclipse, let people know just how passionate your are about the technologies
4. Get involved with the Eclipse projects now — Subscribe to the developer mailing lists, get a bugzilla account, help triage bugs, review the news groups — Generally help out and let people know who you are
5. Blog — Have I mentioned this yet?  If you have an Eclipse blog with some content considering adding yourself to planet eclipse.
6. Add your proposal idea to the SoC Wiki page

 I imagine Google Summer of Code will be very competitive this year, so getting an early start will give you a competitive advantage .  Honestly, the participating in the Google Summer of Code program was one of the best decisions I made.

Tags: soc