Next Tuesday (September 15th), I’m going to be presenting a free webinar to introduce you to the Eclipse provisioning platform, p2, and how it can be leveraged in your own RCP applications.  If you are wondering what p2 is, or how to use it in your own custom RCP application, this webinar is for you!  In particular, we will be looking at how p2 can help you:

• Deliver your bundles and features
• Provide an update mechanism for your application
• Provide a mechanism for users to control their environments (roll back, un-install, etc…)

This course is meant as an introduction to the p2 API.  We will be building on top of standard Eclipse examples so there are no prerequisites outside of basic RCP knowledge.  This webinar will make use of the Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) API.

I only have an hour, so I will try my best to cover:

• Make use of the p2 provisioning platform for software management
• Integrate the creation of p2 repositories into your build system
• Reuse the p2 user interface and existing work-flows
• Customize the p2 user interface for your specific needs
• Debug common pitfalls

Is there anything else people would like me to include if time permits?

The webinar will be free, however, you will need to sign up ahead of time to get a login.  Please see our registration page.

Tags: p2, webinar

There has been a lot of talk lately about p2.  While many people know p2 as the update mechanism used by Eclipse, it is in fact a general purpose provisioning platform.  This means you can use the provisioning platform as a base to build a highly customized provisioning solution for your own needs… whether it is an Eclipse application, OSGi application or anything else.

On September 15, I will be presenting an introduction to p2. In particular, I will demonstrate how you can use p2 to build a provisioning solution for Eclipse RCP applications. The webinar will teach you how you can:

• Make use of the p2 provisioning platform for software management
• Integrate the creation of p2 repositories into your build system
• Reuse the p2 user interface and existing work-flows
• Customize the p2 user interface for your specific needs
• Debug common pitfalls

For more information, please see the registration page.

If you want anything else discussed about p2 in the webinar, please leave a comment and if there is time, I will try to get to it.

Tags: p2, rcp, webinar

Last week Chris Aniszczyk and I did a free three hour OSGi and Equinox Jumpstart webinar.

Yesterday we posted the whole thing as a six part series of movies on the EclipseSource webcast site.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

The webinar was aimed at people who’ve heard the buzz around OSGi but still don’t have a great feel for what it is, what you do with it and how it helps. We covered a pretty broad range of topics from the overall vision and context for OSGi to key concepts like bundles, classloading and componentization as well as PDE tools for writing bundles. Quite a bit of time was spent talking about services and best practices, in particular declarative services (though we did not have enough time to talk about OSGi distributed services). We also spent time talking about p2 provisioning of OSGi bundles and showed some of the scenarios where OSGi’s dynamic module system shine.

Overall the response was great.  We were experimenting a bit with the format and basically did thirty minute chunks covering a topic and then a few minutes to cover questions that people typed in. Several hundred people signed up from all over the world and turnout on the day was awesome. The format seemed to be compelling as even though the webinar was pretty long (we were completely wiped by the end) the vast majority of the attendees stayed to the end.

The EclipseSource team has been doing a number of webinars over the past months including some on RAP single sourcing, p2 and our Yoxos products. We have a plan for more webinars including ones on ECF, Zest and other projects in which we are involved. 

Stay tuned for details!

Tags: equinox, OSGi, p2, webinar

This Thursday (July 9th), there will be a webinar on the topic of single sourcing and in particular, extending Rich Client Platform (RCP) applications to the web using the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) project.

Don’t know what single sourcing is all about? Well, if we look at the traditional definition from the publishing industry:

Sounds like a good idea?

How about we take that a step further and talk about source code and runtime environments:

In our definition of single sourcing, you’re able to take desktop applications built with RCP and run them on the web using RAP. During the webinar, Ralf Sternberg and Ruediger Herrmann will explore the differences between RAP and RCP that are especially relevant to the goal of single sourcing as much code as possible. This means that you’re able to reuse a lot of code and skills in single sourcing projects. If you’re still a bit fuzzy on the topic, a concrete example of single sourcing in practice was the Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) project:

So what are you waiting for, please register for the webinar!

Tags: eclipse, eclipse rap, rap, rcp, Single Sourcing, webinar

Where do you find your bundles?  When a new version of the Eclipse IDE is released do you spend the day (or week) tracking down all your favorite tools?  Of course we have a the Eclipse SDK and a bunch of pre-built packages. We also have the release train with a number of Eclipse projects, but what if you want bundles that are not hosted at Eclipse.org?  What about tools like Checkstyle, ANTRL, and EclEmma?  What bundles do you need for your version of Eclipse?  Do these conflict with existing plugins?

On Thursday, Jordi and I will be presenting a Webinar about Yoxos, our free Eclipse download service.  Yoxos brings together a large collection of Eclipse and 3rd party bundles into one convienent location.  Yoxos started as a Eclipse distribution in 2004 (much like a Linux distribution), but it has grown into a complete provisioning solution for Eclipse users.  Using Yoxos On Demand, you can create a custom distribution from over 4,000 different bundles.

In the webinar, we will talk about how we built Yoxos, how you can construct a custom distribution and share it with co-workers, how you can share your workspace settings with others, and the future of Yoxos.  We will also talk about some exicting new things we are doing at EclipseSource and provisioning in general.

Please join us on Thursday at 11:00am Eastern Time.

Tags: webinar, yoxos

e4 is now an official incubating project under the Eclipse project, the review ended positively and uneventful.

There have been some promising experiments and demos going on already, the latest ones mainly targeting the desktop side of the affairs. Using the source code of the latest EMF based demos and compiling it against the RAP target platform revealed only a few api methods that were not available, and not now the code is already running in the browser.

It is really cool that there are no singletons in the new codebase, so it is working in a multi-user environment without any changes necessary. It does not yet look pretty, but that is another topic we want to address with e4 …

The demo shown on the screenshot above is a good example that even if you can reuse the same code for client and web it does not always makes sense. The point here is that the image is now resized on the server to fit within the space available for the CTabFolder. It would be much better to have the browser handle this on the client side.

It is often possible to deal with different requirements of server and client effectively if you follow some best practices. Frank, the technical lead of the RAP team will do a webinar on this topic on Oct 23.

Tags: eclipse rap, events, webinar