At the recent OSGi Tool Summit, one of the biggest discussion items that came up was visualization. This makes perfect sense to me as visualizations can be a powerful tool, whether it's for reviewing your architecture or sharing information with colleagues. In the OSGi world, I only know of two projects starting to scratch the surface of visualizing OSGi systems: PDE and Knopflerfish. Since I...
Read MoreAs many people know, Google recently announced support for Java on its AppEngine platform. As a connoisseur of OSGi, the first natural thing that came across my mind was quickly I could get OSGi running on it. Well, I'm happy to announce that we are part way there. I have OSGi running locally on the AppEngine SDK using the Equinox servlet bridge. I've managed to...
Read MoreOnce 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...
Read MoreIn the last few days, there have been a number of provocative and interesting posts around the issue of how to maintain Eclipse's innovation, as well as commercial growth, and project contributions Bjorn's - It's a New World Doug's - On the Future of Eclipse and Michael's - Eclipse Freeloader Award There is some long-standing social science/economics work that is relevant. For example, see The Logic of Collective Action. ...
Read MoreSince Eclipse 3.3, placing contributions in a menu (via the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension point) has been a bit challenging given the new locationURI attribute: While at EclipseCon 2009, I had time to sit down with Paul Webster and hack the menu spy functionality of the Plug-in Spy to spit out location URIs. For example, if you selected the JDT open project wizard, you would get this popup: Another...
Read MoreI'm excited to have the opportunity to speak at the upcoming Eclipse Forum India conference next week. I will be giving three talks: What's new in Eclipse Plug-in Development OSGi for Eclipse Developers Single Sourcing: Extend your RCP Application to the Web with RAP It looks like Eclipse will be well represented at the conference, there will be talks on EclipseLink, Modeling, SWTBot, RCP and RAP. Personally, I'm thrilled...
Read MoreIt's great to see a new milestone of e4 released (new and noteworthy)! The major new and noteworthy item in my opinion is that XWT was included for the first time in e4: What is XWT? XWT is a declarative widget framework that allows you to specify UI components in a declarative fashion. SWT code is generated automatically from an XML-based UI declaration. It's kind of nice...
Read MoreECF is finishing up it's implementation of RFC 119 (distributed OSGi) for release with Galileo (aka ECF 3.0). Over beers at EclipseCon, Ian Skerrett suggested to me that we needed a name for this work...
Read MoreAs 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...
Read MoreAs a Riena committer, it's always nice to see people taking interest in Riena. Feedback at EclipseCon has been very positive. I was also impressed by RedView - a UI-generator based on EMF and Riena, which is becoming available soon. Now James Sugrue wrote "Riena - A New Adventure in Eclipse" over on DZone. The article introduces Riena, walks you through installation, shows how to create and theme an application...
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