We are very pleased to report that the long awaited 2nd edition of the Eclipse RCP book (http://eclipsercp.org) is going to the presses on Thursday, April 15th. That means it should be in the stores by the end of the month. Of course, you don’t have to wait, you can pre-order from Amazon or read it online at Safari. Check out the book website for more info.

In addition to the snazzy new cover, this book is an update of the original content to include new technologies, updated workflows and more detail. Here is the marketing blurb from the back cover…

In Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Second Edition, three Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) project leaders show how to use Eclipse 3.5 (“Galileo”) to rapidly deliver cross-platform applications with rich, native-feel GUIs.

The authors fully reveal the power of Eclipse as a desktop application development platform; introduce important new improvements in Eclipse 3.5; and walk through developing a full-featured, branded RCP application for Windows, Linux, Mac, and other platforms—including handheld devices and kiosks.

Drawing on their extensive experience, the authors cover building, refining, and refactoring prototypes; customizing user interfaces; adding help and software management features; and building, branding, testing, and shipping finished software. They demonstrate current best practices for developing modular and dynamically extensible systems, using third-party code libraries, packaging applications for diverse environments, and much more.

For Java programmers at all levels of experience, this book

• Introduces important new RCP features such as p2, Commands, and Databinding
• Thoroughly covers key RCP-related technologies such as Equinox, SWT, JFace, and OSGi
• Shows how to effectively brand and customize RCP application look-and-feel
• Walks through user interface testing for RCP applications with SWTBot
• Illuminates key similarities and differences between RCP and conventional plug-in development

Hands-on, pragmatic, and comprehensive, this book offers all the real-world, nontrivial code example working developers need—as well as “deep dives” into key technical areas that are essential to your success.

Tags: book, eclipse, rcp, syndicate

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.

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate

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

Today we formalized some changes in the Eclipse Series of books. Some time ago Lee Nackman left IBM and his various roles related to Eclipse. Many of you may not know Lee but he was instrumental in the early days of Eclipse and IBM’s ongoing contribution and commitment to Eclipse. Lee, Erich Gamma and John Weigand envisioned and created the Eclipse Series of more then 20 books that today conveys so much vital information to the Eclipse community.

I’m pleased to report that I am taking over Lee’s place on the Eclipse Series editorial board. One of my first tasks has been to help in the redesign of the series look. The result of that effort can be seen in the OSGi and Equinox book going to press this week.

The original series had a sequence of Eclipse photos. This was fitting and attractive. Unfortunately, many of the photos looked similar and as a result is was hard to distinguish one book from another. For the new look we have standardized on a new color scheme and layout. Different books will have distinct images largely at the discretion of the authors but the overall look will be consistent.

We have also introduced a subtle branding differentiation through the use of the Eclipse or EclipseRT logos (see the top left corner) depending on their focus (tooling vs. runtime).

In this new role I will be looking for new ways to drive the content that the community needs. Writing a book is a huge investment and while many teams have made very significant technical contributions, they are not big enough or well-funded enough to write books. There are a few ideas kicking around for how to lower the barrier and what topics are in most need of coverage. While we have  great wealth of new projects at Eclipse, the book pipeline is surprisingly sparse.

As with everything at Eclipse, the community can help. Your suggestions for formats, topics and indeed, content are more than welcome. Feel free to contact me directly or post comments on this blog.

Tags: books, eclipse, syndicate

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

We’ve reached the 20th of Movember and its time for a progress report from this Eclipse Mommitter.

• Shaved in the ‘stache earlier in the week
• Kids just could not stop laughing
• Wife would not look at me or kiss me
• After a week there has been some progress.
• The kids have finally stopped laughing (though now “pull the ‘stache is the game of the day)
• Wife will kiss me but still can’t really look at me

Here, judge for yourself.

Its a little strange to be out in public with the new look. I spent much of the week on the road for the EclipseRT days in Austin and Toronto.  Great events with lots of good people around.  I particularly enjoyed that there were ample breaks between sessions and lots of good conversations. And it turns out that the whole Movember thing is a good ice-breaker.  Even got a donation out of it! Valentin Baciu, another Mommitter of similar moustache design donated more to the cause.  Thanks! The Eclipse Mommitter team is up to $2200 now.  Pretty good effort but we could always use more donations.

Tags: movember, syndicate

Its mid-Movember and things are getting hairy in Eclipse-land. A dedicated team of committers, the Eclipse Mommitters, have banded together to grow moustaches to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Since I’m basically lazy and work at home, it happens that I’ve not shaved for a couple weeks. So, though late to Movember, I am fully prepared to produce a moustache.

Chris ran a poll to determine the kind of ‘stache he should grow. Great community involvement in setting direction. Keying off that I’m going to try and illustrate the causal connection between contribution and results. This can be applied to any community effort whether its men’s health or Eclipse itself.

The plan is to grow as much facial hair as possible and allow the highest donor to choose what kind of moustache I should sport for the last week of Movember. As an added bonus, it turns out that that week I will be teaching a course at a customer and presenting at the Ottawa Eclipse DemoCamp so there is some risk here for me…

The person with the highest cumulative donations on Movember 22nd at 23:59ET (or thereabouts) will be identified in a comment on this blog entry. If it looks particularly dangerous for me, I reserve the right to override the donor with a 2x donation. I will wear the designated moustache for the following week.

So get out the credit cards and put in your donation now. You can check out Mo progress first hand next week at one of the EclipseRT days in Austin or Toronto.

Tags: eclipse, syndicate

Autumn is in the air (wouldn’t know it here.  17C!) so it must be time for the Fall line up of “Eclipse days” and demo camps. This year I’ll be at two Eclipse Days and three demo camps!

First we have the EclipseRT days in Austin and Toronto. Are you in the area? Come on by and tell people about your use of Eclipse in runtime scenarios or find out how others are getting the power of Eclipse modularity and all that good stuff in their clients, servers and embedded devices. There are talks from the projects, talks from the community. Fun for kids of all ages.

Due to a happy coincidence of travel and cosmic forces I’ll also be at the DemoCamps in Toronto, Vienna and Ottawa. Should be very cool.  I’m particularly excited to see one of these fabled European DemoCamps in action.

Its going to be a busy few weeks. Hope to see you at one or more of these events.

Tags: eclipse, rt, syndicate, talks

This morning at the ESE EclipseRT tutorial we are having a great set of talks on Equinox, RAP, EclipseLink and Riena. The room was full and the audience asking lots of great questions. It is great to see so many people interested in EclipseRT.

Unfortunately, there was another episode in the continuing saga of me, demos and the Mac. I was to present various things about Equinox and OSGi. The discussion went fine and short of not being able to switch Mac Spaces screens using the mouse, strange, that was great. When it came to demo however, things were not so good.

Much of the tutorial is based on Toast, an example application that comes from the new OSGi and Equinox book and is now an Example project at Eclipse. The Toast client has lots of great stuff including integration with Google Earth.  Unfortunately, for some reason that only works when running on Carbon on the Mac. OK. Since I updated to Snow Leopard I had to install some retro JREs to get Carbon. Hmm, OK.  To run the with this while running the IDE on Cocoa means I have to setup my PDE Target Platform to use Carbon explicitly.  Err, sure, why not…

Well, it seems there is a bug in PDE (well, apparently the bug is in SWT) that prevents one from editing a Target Platform to set Environment values.  Seemingly my changes were just ignored despite showing in the UI.  Not so great.  The net effect was that my demo failed.  Sigh.

To work around this I had to hand edit the .target file’s XML to add

<environment>
<ws>carbon</ws>
</environment>

Now the client works! Of course it was my fault for updating my target just before the demo and believing what the UI was telling me.  Live and learn…  I’m starting to feel a bit like Steve the Uber Geek.

It seems that there are a few other issues like this in the Target Platform editor around Software Sites.  Seems that these are issues related to Cocoa. Working on the Mac still feels like using the poor cousin of Eclipse. Oh well, there is always VMware.  But then Google Earth does not run so well there either…

Tags: equinox, OSGi, syndicate, toast

Cool logo and cool sessions at ESE.

At ESE in a couple weeks we are running both an EclipseRT tutorial and symposium. A full day of runtime fun!  No idea what I’m talking about? EclipseRT is the community of people at Eclipse that are creating and using Eclipse technology in runtime (i.e., non-tooling) scenarios.

Turns out that there are a great number of projects involved and not just the ones in the RT top-level project.  BIRT, EMF, GEF, … all have runtime elements. The RT project itself hosts such leading runtime technology as Equinox (the OSGi and JSR232 reference implementation) EclipseLink (the JPA2 reference implementation), Jetty (very popular embeddable web server) and a host of other great projects like RAP, Riena, Swordfish, ECF, eRCP etc. No wonder we need a whole day to talk about all this.

The day starts with a 4 hour EclipseRT tutorial covering the Equinox, OSGi, server side use, tooling, RAP and single sourcing, Riena and EclipseLink. The tutorial will build on input from previous symposia where nearly everyone commented on the need for a good end to end example of Eclipse in the runtime world. We are using Toast, the example application from the upcoming OSGi and Equinox book and now part of the Eclipse Examples project.

After a full morning of learning, we’ll have a bit of an unconference style symposium to talk about issues and topics in the EclipseRT world. While the direction will depend significantly on who shows up, we hope to cover architecture and how promote integration and adoption, community issues such as release trains, repo organization etc and experience reports from the real world.

Presumably this will all be followed by a number of frosty beverages.

Check out the event wiki page for more information and evolving discussion topics.

Tags: equinox, events, OSGi, rap, riena, syndicate