Ian is an Eclipse committer and EclipseSource Distinguished Engineer with a passion for developer productivity.
He leads the J2V8 project and has served on several Eclipse technical committees.
Ian holds a Bachelor and Master’s degree from the University of Waterloo and a PhD from the University of Victoria.
I have started writing about my experiences with Kubernetes and the PicoCluster. The PicoCluster is a set of inexpensive boards (10 Rock64 boards in my case), housed in a single cluster with a network …
GitHub API for querying users & repositories In this article, we will look how we used the GitHub API for querying users and repositories of an organization. In particular, we will look at how …
Cloud native, highly available, web-scale, coordinated containerized applications! Wow, that’s a mouthful, but what does it mean? Over the past six years, many large companies have started telling the …
Authentication & user management is hard Ok, it’s not one of the two hardest problems in Computer Science, but adding authentication to your web-based application is non-trivial. In addition to the …
JavaScript has been used as a client side language for over 20 years and as a server side language for close to 10. In the past 3 years, JavaScript has emerged as a language of choice for mobile app …
In preparation for the Tabris.js 2.0 release, we started counting down the 10 features of Tabris.js 2.0 that we’re most excited about. We reached the halfway point, which means that the release is …
After over a year of development, Tabris.js 2.0 is almost here. To help celebrate this, the Tabris.js development team is counting down some of the features we’re most excited about. Over the past …
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a symmetric-key encryption algorithm. Symmetric-key algorithms are algorithms for cryptography that use the same cryptographic keys for both encryption of …
Code signing and verification is the process of digitally signing executables or scripts to ensure that the software you are executing has not been altered since it was signed. I previously outlined …
Tabris.js is a cross platform mobile toolkit that enables application developers to target multiple platforms from a single JavaScript code base. Unlike some other cross-platform toolkits, Tabris.js …
Code signing and verification is the process of digitally signing executables or scripts to ensure that the software you are executing has not been altered since it was signed. Code signing helps …
Mobile software development is hard. Before you can even write your first line of code you must: download, install and configure the IDEs and SDKs, configure the emulators or connect a device to your …
I returned home late the other night, and saw this tweet in my timeline: https://twitter.com/marckhouzam/status/761389998788714496 He added a clarifying note that said the ‘?’ was also broken. For …
Memory management in J2V8 has never been easy. Because J2V8 bridges V8 and Java, three different memory models are in play. Both Java and JavaScript provide a managed memory model with their own GC. …
When J2V8 was first released, all callbacks from JavaScript to Java required a registered Java method. That is, all Java methods that you wished to invoke had to be first registered with J2V8. For …
Last week I finally published the Node.js bindings for Java. These bindings allow developers to embed the Node.js runtime directly onto the JVM through the Java Native Interface. In March I gave a …
When J2V8 was first released, all Java characters passed between Java and V8 were converted to 8bit C-Style strings. For many applications this was just fine, but if your JavaScript contained 16 bit …
J2V8 provides the technology to link V8 and Node.js with the JVM. Using JNI, Java developers can directly call V8 and Node.js APIs. This seamless integration brings improved JavaScript performance, …
After over a year of development, I am very excited to announce that J2V8 4 is publicly available on all supported platforms. J2V8 is a set of V8 bindings for Java. This means that you can embed V8 …
Gone are the days of single vendor lock-in, where one technology stack is used across an entire organization. Even small organizations and hobbyists will find themselves mixing technologies in a …
Symmetric cryptographic algorithms are algorithms that use the same key for both encryption and decryption. That is, a Code + Key will produce a Cypher, and the Cypher + Key will produce the Code. …
Tabris.js was designed to help developers build native cross-platform apps using a single JavaScript codebase. We offer many tools to boost efficiency - like the Tabris.js developer app and the cloud …
Earlier this year Microsoft released ChakraCore – their powerful next generation JavaScript engine – as an OpenSource project under an MIT license. Microsoft also announced that they would be …
The best way to predict the future is to invent it The software landscape is constantly changing and while software may be eating the world, those who fail to adapt will be swallowed whole. At …
Just in time for Christmas, J2V8 3.1 is now available. It ships as standard JAR from Maven Central, an Android Archive (AAR) for your Android developer friends, and now as an OSGi bundle. Here is the …
J2V8 is a set of Java Bindings for V8. I’m happy to announce that with the 3.1 release, we now ship J2V8 as an OSGi bundle. This means that you can easily use J2V8 on your favourite OSGi runtime, or …
October 2015 marked my 7th anniversary with EclipseSource. For s_even__years I’ve been working remotely for an amazing company!_ For those of you who don’t know me, I live and work in Victoria British …
J2V8 enables developers to embed Google’s V8 JavaScript engine in their Java applications. V8 is entirely implemented in C++ and we enable this embedding by creating a thin JNI (Java Native Interface) …
We built J2V8 to bring highly performant JavaScript to Java in general, and to the Android platform in particular. By exposing Google’s V8 JavaScript API in Java, developers can now embed V8 into …
Like many other operating system vendors, Microsoft provides a store from which users can install apps from. Stores such as the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and the Windows Store make it …
One of the most common mobile views for displaying information is the collection view. The collection view is a scrollable list often used for presenting data as a series of rows and has been part of …
J2V8 is a set of Java bindings for V8. J2V8 brings the V8 API to Java developers. We developed J2V8 to help with the performance of Tabris.js, our cross-platform, mobile development toolkit. A common …
Last month I spent 10 days in Germany. I spent time at the EclipseSource headquarters in Karlsruhe, where I enjoyed schnitzel, good beer and a few strange sights. I also attended EnterJS, where we …
Eclipse Mars is here! Over the past 10 days I’ve been counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Mars features I’m most excited about. 10. Mac Application Layout 9. Platform Improvements 8. UI Monitoring 7. …
By this time tomorrow, Eclipse Mars will have shipped. We will be enjoying many of the new features including improved Git support, docker tools, and a number of Java tool enhancements. But before …
After 12 months of work, almost 80 projects, 380 committers, 352 contributors, and 65 million lines of code, we’ve finally arrived at Eclipse release week. Eclipse will ship on Wednesday June 24th, …
Eclipse Mars is just around the corner. As the Eclipse team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on everything, I’m traveling Europe, presenting about Tabris.js and J2V8 and counting down the …
Eclipse Mars will ship on Wednesday June 24th. While Eclipse can be used for C, C++, JavaScript, PHP and many other languages, many people still consider Eclipse a Java IDE, and a pretty darn good one …
Eclipse Mars ships in 1 week, and that means that we are at the half-way point in my Eclipse Mars Top 10 List. Number 6 on my list is a feature that’s been in development for a while now and long …
With just over one week until Eclipse Mars ships, I’ve been counting down the Eclipse Features I’m most excited about. Recently I’ve been working on JNI bindings for V8 to bring the V8 API to Java. …
We all hate waiting! The good news is that Eclipse Mars is only 1 1/2 weeks away and to help you while you wait for this great release, I’m reviewing the Top 10 Eclipse Mars features that I’m most …
As we push towards Eclipse Mars I’ve started my annual tradition of counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Features that I’m most excited about. Number 9 on my list is Platform Improvements. The Eclipse …
10 Years ago, while studying at the University of Victoria, I developed Zest: the Visualization Toolkit for Eclipse. The goal of the project was to define APIs and Eclipse based implementations for a …
J2V8 is a set of Java bindings for Google’s popular JavaScript engine, V8. It was developed to bring highly efficient JavaScript to Android and is the workhorse behind Tabris.js. J2V8 also runs on …
J2V8 is a set of Java bindings for the popular V8 JavaScript engine. In this tutorial we will explore how to use J2V8 as a JavaScript engine on Heroku. Heroku Heroku is a cloud based Platform as a …
While long overdue, I’ve finally written the Getting Started Guide for J2V8.
On April 30th 2015, Tabris.js 1.0 was released. Tabris.js is a mobile framework which enables developers to write cross-platform, native, mobile applications entirely in JavaScript. Unlike other …
J2V8 is a set of Java bindings for Google’s popular JavaScript engine, V8. As we push towards J2V8 3.0, the focus has been on multithread support. We’ve already discussed how to use multiple threads …
Tabris.js makes it easy to build native, cross-platform, mobile applications. Since its release on April 30th, I’ve been highlighting many of the features of Tabris.js 1.0. Many of these features – …
When we built Tabris.js, our goal was to provide a cross-platform, mobile development toolkit that developers love to use. We set out to make mobile development easy and accessible to everyone. From …
Tabris.js is a mobile app development framework that gives you the tools to develop your mobile apps entirely in JavaScript. Tabris.js 1.0 was released on April 30th and to celebrate the release, I’ve …
For the past week I’ve been celebrating the release of Tabris.js 1.0 by counting down the Top 10 Tabris.js features that I’m most excited about. Tabris.js is a mobile app development framework that …
J2V8 provides a tight binding between Java and the V8 JavaScript engine. Using JNI, you can execute JS scripts on V8, get and set values, register callbacks and invoke JavaScript functions – all from …
To celebrate the release of Tabris.js 1.0, I’m counting down the Top 10 Tabris.js features that I’m most excited about. Tabris.js is a mobile framework which enables developers to write …
On April 30th Tabris.js 1.0 was released. Tabris.js is a mobile framework which enables developers to write cross-platform, native, mobile applications entirely in JavaScript. To celebrate the …
I’m happy to announce the availability of J2V8 2.2 (2.2.1 actually). This release adds two important features: 1) Typed Arrays and 2) 64 Bit Windows support. Typed Arrays In Javascript, most arrays …
When working with JNI, sooner or later you will need to track references to native objects. This came up in J2V8 pretty quickly. With J2V8 we need to keep a handle to the V8 Isolate (an isolated V8 …
On April 30th Tabris.js 1.0 was released, providing developers with the tools to write native mobile applications entirely in Javascript. To celebrate the release, I’ve been counting down the Top 10 …
On April 30th 2015 we released Tabris.js, and so far the reception has been remarkable! Building beautiful, high quality, native mobile applications – written entirely in Javascript – is a real game …
In this tutorial we will show you how to debug a Tabris.js application running on your Android phone using the Over the Air debug protocol. To get started you will need: A Tabris.js account The …
Wiki’s and Readme files are the most common ways to document a build. While documenting a build is better than not documenting it, Wikis and Readme files have two flaws when used to describe a …
Tabris.js provides cross-platform access to native gestures and controls through Javascript. In recent articles we have explored images, swipe to dismiss, user input and even parallax scrolling. Today …
The EclipseSource team has landed in San Francisco and many of us are hard at work finalizing our presentations. It looks like a busy week as we are giving 5 talks, 3 tutorials and organizing the …
Last year I announced J2V8, a new JavaScript engine for Java that wraps V8 with a set of Java Bindings. We have been using this technology to power Tabris.js on Android – giving us much better …
If you are an Eclipse committer and planning on attending EclipseCon 2015, we need your help! We are organizing a hackathon to be held during EclipseCon. The goal of the hackathon is to help new …
If you have three minutes and access to an iOS or Android device, you can develop your first cross platform, native, mobile application with JavaScript, using Tabris.js. 1. Request an invite to …
Over the past 4 months I’ve been working on integrating Java and JavaScript in a highly efficient manner. Rhino and Nashorn are two common JavaScript runtimes, but these did not meet our requirements …
The EclipseCon 2015 submission deadline is Monday November 17th. Of course we are looking for great Eclipse / OSGi / RCP content, but we are also looking for talks on really cool Java technologies, …
On Saturday June 28th Yoxos celebrated a pretty big anniversary, Yoxos turned 10! Yoxos is the original Eclipse ‘distribution’, born with Eclipse 3.0 in 2004. Yoxos originally brought a variety of …
Eclipse Luna release day is here! As predictable as the sun rising in the east, Eclipse has shipped yet another quality release on-time. Over the past ten days I’ve been counting down the Top 10 …
Eclipse Luna is here! 10 years after the first Eclipse annual summer release shipped, the Eclipse team is still shipping quality software on-time and on-budget. Eclipse Luna contains 76 different …
Eclipse Luna ships tomorrow and that means we’ve made it to number 2 on the Eclipse Luna Top 10 Features That I’m Excited About. Number 2 is a feature enhancement that was first requested in 2002. …
Eclipse release week is here and Eclipse Luna will be available on Wednesday June 25th. Eclipse release week also means that we are into the Top 3 Eclipse Features on my traditional Eclipse Top 10 …
When Eclipse 3.0 shipped in 2004 it brought a new look to the workbench. Now, 10 years later, an entirely new Dark Theme is launching. Eclipse Luna will ship in less than a week and to help mark the …
Code Recommenders is one of the most exciting and innovative plug-ins available for Eclipse. With standard content-assist, Eclipse will show you all the method calls, variables uses, template options, …
Eclipse Luna will ship in 1 week. While some of the development teams are putting their final bits in place, many committers have decided to celebrate by going to EclipseCon France. Toulouse is a long …
For 10 years Eclipse has set the gold standard for on-time software delivery. Eclipse Luna is just over 1 week away and this year’s release is going to be great. To help celebrate the Eclipse release, …
Eclipse is obviously known for its great Java tooling, but the real power of Eclipse comes from the thousands of plug-ins that integrate seamlessly. No project exemplifies this more than the Eclipse …
As we get closer to the ship date of Eclipse Luna, I’m counting down the 10 features of Eclipse 2014 that I’m most excited about. Number 9 on my list is a feature that’s close to my heart, graphical …
Seven years ago Eclipse Europa was released. PDE ‘Brought Sexy Back’, CTRL+Awesome shipped and EMF pushed ahead with the brave new world of Java 5. Seven years ago I also wrote my first Eclipse Top 10 …
When committing changes to your source control system, it’s considered good practice to only resolve a single task with each commit. There are several advantages to this approach: The history reads …
I’ve been using Eclipse for over 10 years now but today I discovered something new. You can configure problem severity directly from the problem markers themselves. Let me explain through the use of …
Today I was investigating Bug 427148. The problem is when you update on Windows it sometimes fails if the executable is being updated. This is because the file is locked, and you cannot overwrite it …
Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation In this tutorial we will show how you can program a Raspberry Pi using Eclipse and Java. We will wire a simple circuit and control it using …
Java8 was released in mid-March and the Java 7 End Of Life plan has already been announced. In a perfect world we would all be pushing forward with Java 8, but in reality, other requirements often get …
Last week Java 8 was launched and moments later the Eclipse support for Java 8 was announced. To help celebrate the launch, we had an entire Java 8 Day at EclipseCon 2014, which included sessions from …
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it One of the first tasks when studying anything new is to review the existing literature. As a student, I viewed this as a make-work project, but …
EclipseCon 2014 is less than 6 weeks away and I’m getting pretty excited. The schedule has been published and the diversity of talks is really what makes this such a fun conference. While I helped …
The final submission deadline for EclipseCon 2014 is here! If you haven’t submitted your talk, now is a GREAT TIME! https://twitter.com/irbull/status/402142243911241728 …
Last week was the early-bird deadline for EclipseCon 2014 and I was extremely impressed with the quality of submissions. It was very hard to pick just five, but lucky for me, I have an excellent …
Now that everyone is recovered from EclipseCon Europe – and has plenty of Halloween candy to snack on -- why not spend a few minutes and submit a EclipseCon 2014 talk. The early bird deadline is …
Well I’m going out west where I belong where the days are short and the nights are long In 2014 EclipseCon is headed back to San Francisco and the submission system is now open. Eclipse is leading …
The annual Eclipse release typically indicates the beginning of summer. And if the back-to-school commercials aren’t an indication that summer is winding down, the restarting of the Eclipse milestones …
Eclipse Kepler, the 2013 Eclipse release, is here! This year there are 71 projects, simultaneously shipping 58 million lines of code. Eclipse originally shipped in November 2001 as an Open Source …
As many of you know, Eclipse Kepler is coming out on June 26th 2013. As we prepare for this release, we will be pushing some of the release candidates (and eventually the final release) to our …
Eclipse Kepler is 8 days away and I’m into the Top 3 Features in my Annual Top 10 List. Number 3 on my list is the Eclipse Platform – arguable the most important component for anybody using Eclipse. …
In one week, on June 26th 2013, Eclipse Kepler will ship. To prepare for the release I’m counting down the Top 10 most interesting features according to me. Number 2 on my list is close to my heart – …
As we approach the release of Eclipse Kepler, I’m counting down the Top 10 Features I’m most excited about. Number 4 on my list is RAP 2.x. Powerful, stable and well thought-out APIs is a common theme …
The Eclipse Kepler release is just over 1 week away, and to help celebrate the release I’m counting down the Top 10 Kepler Features I’m most excited about. Number 5 on my list is the much improved …
Since 2001, Eclipse has been setting the standard for Java Development Tools, and with Eclipse Kepler, the JDT team has shipped another top-quality release. As we get closer to Eclipse Kepler, I’m …
A common theme among Eclipse tools is that they keep you focused on your task by keeping you in the IDE. Linux Tools, which is number 7 on my Eclipse Kepler Top 10 List is no different. Linux Tools …
As we move closer to another Eclipse Release, I’m counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Kepler Features that I’m most excited about. Number 8 on my list is Mylyn Reviews with Gerrit integration. For those …
As we approach another Eclipse release, I’m counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Kepler Features that I’m most excited about. A lot has changed during my 10 year involvement with Eclipse, but nothing …
This year marks a special milestone for me as it’s my 10 year anniversary with Eclipse. I started using Eclipse in 2003 as a PhD student at IBM. Eclipse was using CVS, PDE/Build and all plug-in …
For most people, p2 is simply the Install Software Dialog in Eclipse. While this is certainly true (or at least the Install Software Dialog is built with p2), p2 is much more than this. The Eclipse …
Spring has certainly sprung on the west coast of Canada, and that means we are into the Eclipse Kepler endgame. Milestone 7 is the last Kepler milestone before we start rolling out release candidates …
Overview This article describes how to install Eclipse plug-ins from an update site (p2 repository) that is hosted on an HTTP(s) server with a self-signed (SSL) certificate. The Problem If you try and …
EclipseCon 2013 Starts next week, and from my twitter feed it seems the Eclipse community has already started their pilgrimage to Boston. While many people know Eclipse as a great IDE, did you know …
Just in time for the IDEs of March (@wayne gets the credit for that one), the Eclipse and Equinox teams are happy announce that Eclipse Kepler Milestone 6 is now available for download. …
Yoxos is a great way to manage your Eclipse installs. With over 2,000 plug-ins to choose from, you can create your Eclipse, your way. But what if your favorite plug-in is not available in the Yoxos …
Today, while fixing some Unicode characters support in Yoxos, I noticed that the Eclipse console was not rendering the unicode characters properly. Luckily this is really easy to fix. In the Launch …
It’s hard to believe that we’re already 1 month into 2013 and that means that Eclipse Kepler release is less than 5 months away. This is also a great time to get involved and help out (especially with …
EclipseCon 2013 is fast approaching. This year EclipseCon is on the east coast in Boston, MA from March 25-28th. EclipseCon brings together experts from dozens of Eclipse projects along with leaders …
Analyzing and understanding the memory use of an application is challenging. A subtle logic error can result in listeners never being disposed, ultimately leading to the dreaded OutOfMemory error. …
One of my favorite events at EclipseCon is the Eclipse Community Awards. Of course there are always a few fun games (and drinks), but the awards ceremony itself is a real highlight for me. There are …
For those of you who were procrastinating and waiting for the last minute to get your EclipseCon 2013 submission in, your last chance is here. The EclipseCon submission system will be shutdown at the …
Today I travelled from Victoria B.C. to Vancouver B.C. to attend the Eclipse Hack-a-thon. It was a great event and I met some really interesting people. I also had a chance to catch up with some old …
I was struggling to track down an NPE in the Yoxos Launcher that only happened on MacOS. To help others avoid this, I thought I would share the problem (and solution). The stack trace was as follows: …
The EclipseCon program committee has voted on the early bird selections. Congratulations to these five speakers. - Shawn Pearce, Scaling Up JGit - Jake Wharton, Bootstrapping Android Apps with Open …
In many parts of North America we turn our clocks back one hour this weekend. If you’re looking for something to do with all this extra time you’ll have, why not download the latest Eclipse SDK 4.3 …
Wednesday October 31st is Halloween, an evening where children go door to door looking for a treat (candy) – at least in North America. The EclipseCon 2013 program committee would like to offer the …
One of the things I love about working at EclipseSource is that we get the opportunity to work on tools that help developers. Many of us were drawn to Eclipse because we could pitch-in and help-out …
There was a small problem when Eclipse Juno SR1 was released late last month. While I won’t bore you with the details (you can read about it on bug 390756), the crux of the problem is that the …
There are several good reasons to use a Rebase Workflow with Git, such as the ability to keep a linear history. However, when I started using the Git Plugin for Eclipse I was unsure of how to follow …
What happens when you mix one of the best open source communities with some awesome open source software in a really cool city like Boston Massachusetts? You get the making of one amazing conference. …
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors. (reference) I appears that P2 (em, p2) suffers from both of these things, but today I’m …
When new developers join a team, or existing developers move quickly between projects, setting up a development environment can be a real headache. Most software teams will (hopefully) share a set of …
If you’re using Eclipse and sharing your code (and issues) on GitHub, you really should take a look at the variety of Eclipse Plugins for working with Git. The most obvious plugin is EGit, the Eclipse …
Eclipse is an extensible IDE, giving users lots of freedom (and opportunity) to customize the tool for their own use. However, sometimes you run up against a barrier and the only way to get around it …
In June I discussed how to programatically configure Eclipse proxy settings. This is useful if you are using Eclipse APIs (such as ECF) for your communication. However, in some cases you may also use …
Most web architectures make use of several machines working together to serve content. In Yoxos, we use a front end web-server, multiple Database servers, and extra compute servers to calculate all …
In 2004 a new Major Version of the Eclipse platform was released: Eclipse 3.0. This release delivered a universal platform for application delivery and included the OSGi runtime. Now, 8 years later, …
The original architects of Eclipse knew that developing a single IDE that met everybody’s needs was an impossible task. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, the team opted for an extensible model, in …
Eclipse Juno, the simultaneous Eclipse release for 2012 will be available in 3 days. Three days left until Juno means that I’m into the Top 3 Eclipse features in my Juno Top 10 List. During the past …
And now for something completely different… or maybe not. Since I first got involved with the Eclipse ecosystem (in 2003) I’ve struggled to come up with a common theme among all Eclipse projects. They …
There is less than 1 week to the Eclipse Juno release and I’ve been busy counting down The Top 10 Juno Features that I’m most excited about. Over the past 10 years Eclipse has been classified as many …
Designing and delivering a piece of software that has a lasting effect on almost all software developers is hard. Doing it twice, that’s almost imposible. In the early 1990’s, Linus Torvalds gave us …
Many Eclipse projects follow a common theme of extensible platforms with exemplary tools. Eclipse projects are often designed with a high degree of extensibility in mind, allowing consumers to use the …
As we often say, Eclipse is a platform for everything and nothing in particular. And while this is certainly true, the most common use of Eclipse is as a state-of-the-art Integrated Development …
As Eclipse sprints towards another release – Eclipse Juno – I’m counting down the Top 10 Features that I’m most excited about. As I mentioned yesterday, this is the 5th time I’ve compiled my Top 10 …
Eclipse has provided high-quality tools to millions of developers for over 10 years, for free. For the 7th consecutive year, Eclipse will ship a simultaneous release. A simultaneous release is a …
CouchDB is very powerful, NoSQL database that uses JSON for Document, JS for Map/Reduce queries and HTTP for an API. Since all communication with CouchDB is done via HTTP requests, CouchDB can easily …
Lately the p2.index file (or lack thereof) has caused a serious problem for the Eclipse foundation infrastructure. Denis highlighted the problems the file causes, but I thought it might help us …
If you use Eclipse and the Eclipse provisioning platform (p2) behind a proxy, then you´re no doubt aware of theNetwork Connection Preference Dialog. While this dialog works well if you need to …
As Pascal mentioned yesterday, on a Mac, Eclipse based applications can now be shipped with the standard Mac layout. For those not familiar with the problem, if you structure your Mac application in a …
Each year Eclipse publishes 7 milestone releases before starting the endgame. Today the Eclipse and Equinox teams are proud to make Eclipse 3.8/4.2 (Juno) Milestone 7 available for download. There are …
Yoxos not only provides you with a way to pool all your plugins in a single directory, but you can also configure that location. Eclipse/p2 bundle pooling means that different applications (different …
Next week I’ll be at EclipseCon in Reston, Virginia. EclipseCon has always been my favorite conference and if my math hasn’t failed me, this will be my 6th one. I’ll be giving two presentations on p2 …
EclipseCon is just around the corner (1 week away). While many people are busy getting their talks finalized, suitcases packed, and studying their maps of Washington DC, the Eclipse and Equinox teams …
The Eclipse provisioning platform (p2) has a pretty awesome resolver (the planner) that computes all the requirements when you try to install something. It’s this awesome resolver that let’s you …
I’ve just pushed 1900+ Eclipse plugins to amazon cloud front for fast delivery to Yoxos users. This includes Eclipse Indigo SR2 plus hundreds of add-on components. In addition to this, I’ve just …
Shipping Eclipse each year is a lot of work. The SDK contains code from 3 Top level projects (Eclipse, RT and Tools (Orbit)). There are 4+ Products (Platform, JDT, PDE , Equinox + Releng) and close to …
There have been a discussion about build naming conventions lately. SNAPSHOTS, nightly, milestone, GA, maintenance, integration, stable, etc… In both Nick’s and Mickael’s posts, I noticed a theme: all …
Eclipse has two annual conferences, EclipseCon (North America) and EclipseCon Europe. These are great venues to learn about what’s happening in the Eclipse eco-system, explore up-and-coming …
Inspired by David Orme’s retrospective on Eclipse – and with the 10th anniversary of Eclipse almost upon us – I though I would share my personal history with the Tool, Platform and Community. I first …
EclipseSource now has a 2 day course that focuses entirely on the p2 API. Like our other courses, our p2 course reinforces the theoretical concepts with hands-on exercises. The course covers a wide …
Pascal Rapicault, DJ Houghton and I have been hacking on a new feature for p2. Since p2 has been migrated to Git, we created a new branch and started hacking away. We were not very concerned about …
With summer behind us and autumn almost here (in the northern hemisphere), you can feel the change in the air. The Eclipse and Equinox teams have made Juno Milestone 2 available, however, these …
Lately I’ve been adding Git support to the Yoxos Workspace Provisioning. This should be done in time for Eclipse Indigo SR1 and this will mean you can easily share your Git configurations in your …
While I’ve been enjoying some time-off in Northern Ontario, many Eclipse committers have been keeping busy. I hope everyone managed to get their hands on the Eclipse Indigo Release, although the …
A number of people in the Eclipse community have been trying out Google+ and some good Eclipse related discussions are starting to happen there. Since many of us have multiple Google accounts (maybe …
It’s interesting to see how Eclipse projects change over time. As projects ramp up, hit heavy development and finally start to mature, the flurry of activity changes. Git makes it very easy to pull …
The Eclipse Packaging Project defines pre-configured Eclipse distributions. If you are developing in C/C++ there’s a package for that. If you need to create RCP applications there’s a package for …
As you may know I live on the Canadian west coast (In Victoria British Columbia). We are 3 hours behind Easter Time, which means that the Eclipse release was supposed to happen at 6:00am for me. I …
After 12 months, 62 projects, 46, 000, 000 lines of code, over 400 committers and 1 Top 10 List: Eclipse Indigo is available on eclipse.org (Or use the new Yoxos launcher to install Eclipse from AWS …
We are one day away from the Eclipse Indigo release, and that means we are into the Top 2 Features On My Eclipse Indigo Top 10 Feature List. Number 2 on my list has been part of the Eclipse EcoSystem …
There is no question that the mobile market is huge and practically growing by the second. There is some excellent mobile development tools built on top of Eclipse, however, each mobile platform …
The C/C++ Tooling for Eclipse is old Mature! In fact, the first bug report filed against the CDT was opened on January 14th 2002, Only a few months after Eclipse 1.0 shipped. If my trivia knowledge is …
The Eclipse Indigo release is now less than 1 week away, which means I’m into the Top 5 Entries in my Eclipse Indigo Top 10 List. Number 5 on my Top 10 List is near and dear to my heart as I started …
In one week we will be waking up to a new Eclipse release – Eclipse Indigo. I’m using this opportunity to count down my Top 10 Favorite Indigo Features. There are two Eclipse tools that I could not …
As we approach another Eclipse release – this time with over 46 million lines of code – I’m counting down the 10 Indigo features that I’m most excited about. While I’ve been writing about OSGi, …
As we count down the days until June 22nd – the day Eclipse Indigo will ship – I’ve been counting down the top 10 Indigo features, according to me. In my previous article I talked about OSGi and how …
When most people think about Eclipse they think of a kick-ass IDE. While this is true, Eclipse is so much more. Did you know that Eclipse hosts a top-notch webserver (Jetty), a framework for building …
As frequent readers of my blog know I’ve been transitioning to git lately. I actually think CVS (with the Eclipse Team Support, local history management and Mylyn) makes a solid source control …
June is my favorite time of year. Not only is summer starting (in the northern hemisphere), but it’s Christmas time for software developers. On June 22nd, the annual Eclipse release train will arrive. …
It’s always a great idea to use a Source Control Management (SCM) system – even when you are working on personal projects, without any collaborators. However, once you start to work with others and …
A severed head is never fun, and in git this is no different. In fact, a detached head can cause quite the headache. In this article I will discuss what a detached head is, how it can happen, and most …
I’m proud to introduce the newest member of our family, Maggie Anne Bull. Maggie and Mom are at home and both doing well. For those of you keeping score at home; Maggie is our third, joining Sadie and …
For those of you wondering what to get Will and Kate for a wedding gift, what about a nice, new, shiny version of Eclipse. As predictable as the changing of the guard, Eclipse has put out yet another …
Another EclipseCon has come and gone. As an Eclipse user, community member, contributor and committer, EclipseCon is a chance for me to make new contacts, renew old friendships and help payoff my beer …
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 …
Have you used p2? Have you tried to replace plug-in with an updated version, only to find p2 doesn’t find it? Have you removed an unused plug-in and suddenly Eclipse stopped working? You’ve probably …
Just in time for EclipseCon, the Eclipse and Equinox teams have delivered another milestone. This time, Eclipse 3.7 (and 4.1) Milestone 6 are available for download. You can now navigate JavaDoc …
What’s the latest version of Eclipse? Which version of Mylyn works well with Eclipse 3.6.2? How do you configure a toolchain for a project that was developed with Eclipse 3.5? As an Eclipse committer …
In p2, if you’ve ever tried to write to the same artifact.xml (artifact repository) from two different processes, you will quickly learn that this fails. In fact, both processes will start corrupting …
For anyone who follows the Eclipse developer mailing lists, you might notice the weekly e-mails regarding the tagging process. The e-mails usually describe which bundles have been tagged and which …
Well here we are just over half way through the NHL season and the norther hemisphere is in the middle of winter. For those of you who don’t plan on spending the weekend watching the NHL All-Star …
If you were looking for something to give that hard-to-buy-for person on your Christmas list, what about Eclipse 3.7 Milestone 4? That’s right, just as planned, another Milestone has shipped. There …
There are only a few guarantees in life, death, taxes and an Eclipse milestone every 6 weeks. And just like 6 weeks ago, the Eclipse platform team has put out another milestone towards the Indigo …
Well summer is finally over (Autumn is almost officially here), but it doesn’t mean that everyone has been slacking. Over the past few months the Eclipse Platform team managed to ship Helios (on time …
I know Eclipse ‘Help’ is not a very exciting topic, but today I found myself working with a little known secret of Help. Most people know that you can setup context sensitive help (Press F1 and bring …
If anybody is going to be in Dublin next Thursday (Sept 9th), I’ll be talking about OSGi, Software Modularity and Single Sourcing. Details of the event can be found on the course page. If anybody is …
What do the following people have in common: Andre Oosthuizen Ed Burnette Euxx Frank Sauer Gunnar Wagenknecht Luis de la Rosa Martin Perez Vasanth Dharmaraj They were the original 8 feeds on …
Two weeks ago I asked you to think about high quality software that has been consistently delivered on-time. Think about software that is used by millions of people world-wide, built by hundreds of …
Only 1 more day until Eclipse Helios is release and we are down to my Top 2 features. Over the life of Eclipse (Jeff McAffer tells me that he’s been working on Eclipse since 1999) a lot has changed. …
Well here we are, it’s release week. Eclipse 3.6 – Helios – will be available on Wednesday June 23rd. It also means that I’m into my Top 3 features for this years release. For the past 7 days I’ve …
As most of you know, Eclipse Helios will be released next week. For regular readers of my blog (and PlanetEclipse.org), you know that I’ve been counting down some of the new features available in the …
The official Helios release is less than 1 week away, and we are now into the Top 5 Features that I’m most excited about. Over the past week I’ve been highlighting some of upcoming features of the …
There are three large groups of artifacts that play a key role while writing software. There are the tools you use, the code you write and the libraries you depend on. There is a large body of …
As Eclipse committers, we spend lots of time emphasizing that Eclipse is not just an Integrated Development Environment. Eclipse is a framework, a tooling platform, a collection of run-time …
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what defines an Eclipse project? Not in the literal sense (a project hosted at eclipse.org that follows the EDP), but rather, what technical qualities do all …
Yesterday I asked you to think about high-quality software that has been consistently delivered on-time for eight straight years. To make this quiz more challenging, this software should be installed …
Pop quiz: Can you name any ‘high quality’ software that has been consistently delivered on-time, for 8 years in a row? Yes folks it’s that time of year again! It’s time for the Eclipse Release Train …
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 …
Eclipse developers are in the middle of the ‘End Game’. Half way through the release candidates and getting ready for another major release. All the API is in place, the features are ‘complete’ and we …
There are a lot of very good reasons for developers to get on board with Open Source Software (OSS). Businesses are making use of OSS both because of the cost savings and the excellent quality of the …
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 …
I realize that Helios isn’t even out the door yet, but some people are already looking ahead to next years release. The planning council has been taking suggestions for the name of the Eclipse 2011 …
Last summer when Galileo was released, I wrote a series of blogs in which I discussed my top 10 favorite features of the release. Somebody at the Eclipse Foundation must have enjoyed the read because …
One of the key aspects of Agile Software Development – or any iterative software development process – is keeping your customer in-the-loop. In order for customers to have a voice in the software …
As I mentioned a while back, Eclipse Helios M5 was made available for Download. There are number of New and Noteworthy features, but one really big feature was omitted from the N&N. The Eclipse …
Traditionally the Eclipse community has used the mailing lists, newsgroups and an aggregation of blogs to stay connected. Mailing lists and newsgroups have generally been more technical, while the …
Eclipse 3.6 M5 is now available for download. There are lots of new and exciting features, like the ability to open and file directly from the command line. You can also use the synchronize view to …
I spent part of today trying to debug a Linux specific issue in which wizard pages are not being shown properly. Actually, the content of some wizard pages are not showing up at all (Bug 298805 if …
Just in time for the Holidays, the Eclipse platform team has made Eclipse 3.6 Milestone 4 available. Feel free to download it: https://download.eclipse.org/equinox/drops/S-3.6M4-200912101301/index.php …
There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Eclipse community is and is not doing. While I have no intention of going anywhere near that conversation, I did want to highlight something that …
Lately I have been working on (and committing) a repository analyzer tool for p2. It is meant to help you validate your repository against known problems and common mistakes (missing version numbers, …
Recently I had the pleasure of updating the way Yoxos is built. Like a lot of Eclipse based applications, the Yoxos build was feature based and we naturally use the normal headless PDE/Build scripts …
Have you heard about OSGi but are not sure about the details? Are you wondering what this brand new Java technology is all about? Are you concerned that its footprint is too large for your specific …
As most of you know October is coming to an end. This means that M3 is due out soon, ESE is over, and the very early EclipseCon registration deadline is approaching. It also means that Movember is …
e4 0.9M5 is now available for download. One of the things that excites me about this work is the web based form editors that Boris Bokowski has been working on. The form editors have always tried to …
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 …
Yesterday I spent the day working on examples of how PDE Build can be used to build OSGi bundles. I was setting up builders, copying files from my workspace to my builder, and running builds. Early in …
Today is the big day! Eclipse 3.5 – Galileo – is available for the general public. To count down the final push towards Galileo, I have been reviewing the Top 10 features that I’m most excited about. …
As many people have already said, Galileo is available for Friends of Eclipse. As Chris pointed-out, one of the reasons Eclipse is able to ship quality software, consistently on-time, is because of …
Software development can be characterized by the management of two separate, yet equally important groups of artifacts. The source code you write and the libraries you depend on. Much of our …
As I mentioned yesterday, tools such as the Memory Analyzer demonstrates just how dominant Eclipse is in the IDE space. And while Eclipse has many useful tools, nothing has changed the face of the IDE …
With all the great work going on in the Eclipse Run-time space, like the EMF Runtime, RAP, Birt Charting Engine, ECF, Jetty and of course Equinox, I sometimes forget that Eclipse started as an …
As readers of my blog are no doubt aware, I have been counting down the Top 10 Galileo features that I’m most excited about. Galileo is the name of this years “Eclipse Release Train”, the simultaneous …
The next feature on the Top 10 Galileo Features (according to me) comes from the Eclipse Modeling Project. The Eclipse Modeling Project is arguably one of the most diverse, yet well focused, top level …
Just 1 week until the Galileo release, and I’m using this opportunity to count down the top 10 features in Galileo that I’m really excited about. Previously I talked about the improved tooling support …
With Eclipse 3.5 – Galileo – just around the corner, I am counting down the top 10 features I’m most excited about. Number 9 on my list is the improved Java 2 Javascript bridge available in the SWT …
The Eclipse 2009 Release – codename Galileo – will be available in about 10 days. To help countdown the final push, I have decided to review my Top 10 Galileo features. I need to stress that these are …
Last week I presented the publishe, the tool used to put your deployable entities (e.g., bundles) into a p2 repository. The publisher can be used in 4 different ways As a set of headless Eclipse …
There has been a lot of talk lately about p2. Using p2, you can: Validate repositories Describe dependencies Manage your configurations etc… However, all this talk about p2 assumes you have p2 enabled …
One of the things I really like about my job is that I get to spend time working with students. As a software engineer working at EclipseSource Victoria, I spend part of my time at the University of …
Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. This advice can be applied to the art of writing software. At a high-level software seems so easy, but when you start working on a project, …
Have you had the experience of creating an interesting application, exporting it, generating a p2 repository, connecting to your repository, and *BAM*, nothing there! The reason this happens is …
20 Eclipse projects were accepted this year for Google Summer of Code and you can see the complete list here: https://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/eclipse Congratulations to all the …
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 …
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 …
As I left EclipseCon I was a little surprised there wasn’t the famous +1, -1, 0 buckets outside the Hyatt. I wanted to cast my vote for the entire conference. I had a great week and I learned a lot, …
I have been working on one of the most requested Zest features, custom figures, and by EclipesCon it will be finished. Now you are no longer stuck with those little blue rounded rectangles. You can …
The “conversation” around #eclipsecon is really starting to pick up. If you are following the blogs but not twitter, then you are only getting half the news. Checkout the EclipseCon birds nest. What’s …
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, …
As I mentioned previously, Wayne Beaton from the Eclipse Foundation paid a visit to Victoria this week. Wayne is currently on a west-coast road trip visiting a number of schools out here. I had a …
Over the past week I have ignored my daughters, gave-up on work, haven’t seem my wife, and managed to create a web-enabled version of Zest. Ok, most of what I said is lie, however, I did manage to …
Somebody asked me a great question the other day, can p2 be used in non-eclipse systems? This is a great question because I think it highlights the fact that we don’t always make newcomers aware of …
On Monday March 23rd at EclipseCon, I’m helping to deliver a tutorial on one of the most significant platform-level changes made in the Eclipse Ganymede release. The tutorial is on p2, the new …
I saw this presentation today InfoQ. In this video, Erich talks about the Eclipse Way process and how the Eclipse development process evolved over the years. As well, he talks about the importance of …
Anybody building plugins / products / tools based on Eclipse, Milestone 5 is a pretty important time. The API should be stable, most of the features should be spelt out, and the new splash screen is …
Yesterday I stumbled upon a pretty interesting google code project, the Google Visualization API. The Google Visualization API enables you to expose your own data through a number of Visualization …
There are a number of different ways to grab changes from a remote Git repository and bring them into your local repository. The most common way is to simply do a pull. By default this will do a …
p2 is a provisioning platform for Eclipse / Equinox based applications. The p2 platform itself is highly modular, meaning it can be carved and assembled in different ways depending on the task at …
Getting Started J2V8 is a set of Java bindings for Google’s popular JavaScript engine, V8. It was developed to bring highly efficient JavaScript to Android and is the workhorse behind Tabris.js. J2V8 …