Part of my day I’m working on some cool OSGi server stuff. While doing this I came across a few issues with PDE. Mostly they are around launching and self-hosting.

As with all my Open Source engagements, I just don’t stop after reporting them. I also take the time to analyze them and provide patches for them. Why? Well, it saves me a lot of time in the end because I don’t need to live with workarounds.

Here is a list of patches produced so far for Eclipse PDE 3.6:

• Bug 314619 - [patch] org.eclipse.equinox.app is not started when using Eclipse Application launcher
• Bug 315039 - [patch] Eclipse launch configuration should inherit properties from target platform
• Bug 315061 - [patch] Should read start levels from bundles.info of target platform when launching Eclipse application
• Bug 320763 - [patch] SelfHostingProfile needs environment properties

Now, thanks to Eclipse it’s also possible to easily share the patches with you. Just point your Eclipse 3.6 installation to my p2 repository (http://eclipseguru.org/) and install “EclipseGuru’s Patches for PDE“.

Just in case you didn’t know, we had our DemoCamp yesterday in Jena. Needless to say, it was a fantastic event. We had about fifty attendees and seven demos of fifteen minutes each. It was me using yellow and red cards to make sure they stay in time.

Sascha had the pleasure of giving a few opening words.

Steffen showed us how to use Xtext to simplify writing test cases using a DSL.

Mike demonstrated how a lawyer can build an Eclipse RCP application for generating employers’ references without writing any line of code.

Then Matthias introduced us into the world of Git and the Eclipse Git integration.

Jochen – the guy with the three phones – used the Eclipse SDK to develop an Android conference call management app.

Myself talked about Eclipse on servers.

Christoph demoed what that really means. He wrote an application that uses Equionx/Gyrex and allows to upload and manage bundles at runtime through a web interface.

Enrico talked about GenGMF – a modeling framework for easier generation of GMF editors.

Last but not least, a guy with the only Eclipse t-shirt had some nice closing words.

Thank you everybody for coming and thank you all presenters for your great demos. You can view all pictures of the event here.

What? You don’t know what an Eclipse DemoCamp is?

Don’t worry, we have organized one in Jena for you.

The event will take place in our office building on the 29th floor. It’s the tallest building in the city. You can’t miss it. The doors will open at 4pm.

It’s brought to you by AGETO.

And we have picked some interesting topics for you. There will be presentations/demos of runtime technologies (Equinox, OSGi, RCP) as well as tooling (EGit, Android) and modeling (Xtext, GMF).

If you haven’t already and plan to attend, please sign up on the wiki! At the end of the event, we’ll have some frosty beverages and snacks ready for some great discussions!

Have fun!

As part of our “Give Orbit some love for Helios” initiative I started adding categories to Orbit repositories. Whenever you include an Orbit p2 repository in your target platform, you’ll now be able to cherry pick only the bundles you really need from a convenient set of categories. No need to download any unnecessary overhead.

Try it out yourself. Here is a link to an Orbit p2 repository with categories:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/orbit/committers/drops/I20100428041519/updateSite/

I also captured a  screenshot for your convenience:

Frankly, I’m not a creative guy but I had to come up with some categories. Your feedback on the categories is really appreciated.

It’s that time of the year again. Although it will be my fifth EclipseCon, it’s still as exciting as the first one, getting there, meet the community, discover and listen to the new stuff.

Can’t wait to see you there! Oh and I’ll fly FRA-YYC-SFO this time because it will be SFO-YYZ-FRA on my way back with an overnight stay in downtown Toronto (Friday, March 26th). I’m really looking forward to meet old friends there.