I also use them to drive PDE Build. Instead of specifying stuff to fetch for a build again I simply point PDE Build to the same .target file I use in the IDE. Works like a charm as long as you only use “Software Sites” (p2 repositories) which are accessible via URL by any developers Eclipse instance as well as the build machine.

Previously, this was implemented by transforming the .target file XML using XSL into an Ant script. The Ant script did a bunch of p2 mirror calls to download the bytes. I recently upgrade to a newer version of the builder containing a Juno version of the org.eclipse.pde.core bundle. Starting with 3.8 this bundle defines a nice Ant task that does not require the XSLT magic.

<target name="buildTargetPlatform" unless="skipTargetDefinition">
  <!-- note: this requires pde.core (from Juno) in the base builder -->
  <pde.provisionTargetDefinition
      targetFile="/path/to/my.target"
      destinationDirectory="${repoBaseLocation}/target"
      clearDestination="false"/>
</target>

FOSDEM (Feb. 4 – 5, Brussels, Belgium)

I’ve never been in Brussels before. I’ve also never been at FOSDEM before. Andrew told me about his plan to generate some nice Eclipse buzz there. Well, it looks like that will turn out great. Mike will be there too. We’ll have an Eclipse stand for people to show some projects and talks about Eclipse and we’ll also give a few talks about Eclipse. Mine will be about EclipseRT.

EclipseCon (March 26 – 29, Reston, Virginia, USA)

Ok, this one is a classic (for me). I’ve been there before. You gotta have to be there! However, this year my flight to EclipseCon will be shorter. The event moved from the west coast to the east coast. Frankly, I always wondered about switching location away from Santa Clara. But I’ll also miss San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city always worth a visit. Yet it took me three EclipseCons until I finally visited it in 2009 for the first time. I may need to find a new event in that area.  Anyway, I’ll give one of the many tutorials there (Dynamic Server Applications with EclipseRT).

JAX (April 16-20, Mainz, Germany)

Also bit of a classic, I like that event. It’s packed with lots of sessions and people. I’ll talk about developing cloud applications with Eclipse Gyrex. Our first major version (1.0) is only weeks away and that talk will be a great opportunity to learn more about Gyrex and see how we use it to solve some interesting problems.

Hope to see you soon at any of the events!

In case you are interested, I’ll give to talks this week. The first one is today in the afternoon and the second one tomorrow.

• Managing large and distributed Eclipse Server Applications
  Wednesday, 17:00, Willhelm-Krämer-Zimmer

• Developing Runtime Applications with Eclipse Gyrex
  Thursday, 15:30, Seminarräume 5

Eclipse Demo Camp Jena
June 22nd, 5pm
JenTower, floor 27, room Hamburg

Yes, on the day of Indigo GA!

Interested? Register today and we’ll see us next Wednesday. I think there is still room for one or two interesting demos. Thus, if you are developing some cool Eclipse technology or product that you’d like to showcase just add it to the list on the registration page.

See you there!

Once again we are organizing an Eclipse Demo Camp in Jena.

Jena, June 22nd, 2011

If you’d like to attend or present please don’t hesitate to contact me or add yourself to the wiki page!

Our three hours tutorial will introduce you to the key concepts for developing web applications with the OSGi HttpService, the Equinox ServletBridge and Virgo. Virgo is new this year and we are happy to have Glynn and Christopher joining us and talking a bit about Virgo.

We’ll also have a great set of exercises. Thus, please bring your laptops with you and make sure its battery is loaded. All you need is a vanilla Eclipse SDK 3.7 M6 and a JDK on your system. But don’t worry we’ll also have a way to distribute the necessary pieces on site.

Monday, March 21st, 9am
EclipseCon 2011, Ballroom A

See you there!

If you are a committer you are able to vote! If you haven’t received a mail with your voting password yet please have a look at this mail which was sent to the committer mailing list. It explains how to register as a full member with a few steps. Basically you need to sign the membership agreement and fax it to the Foundation’s office. There is still time! Voting ends on March 11, 2011 at 3pm Eastern time.

I think the most interesting challenges for the upcoming term are Git and Gerrit. There is still a significant amount of code in CVS and quite a few projects are planning to switch after the Indigo release. Now Gerrit is interesting. There’s a really good description and a screencast written/created by Alex available. Very good read and watch. It really has some benefits and potential for an important role in managing source contributions to Eclipse projects. I think it’s clear that with Git the current way of handling patches through Eclipse Bugzilla doesn’t scale. So we have to find a good story for integrating Gerrit into the Eclipse IP process. But frankly, I don’t see IPzilla go away anytime soon. There is still the whole management of 3rd party dependencies which is well implemented there. Of course, there is always room for improvement (even outside of IPzilla).

On the other hand, Gerrit is a new tool that needs to be dealt with by the Eclipse webmasters. Once it is an essential part of the Eclipse development infrastructure it needs to be governed with SLAs (which basically translates to manpower). Thus, this effort must be supported by the Board which I hope to drive forward when I’m elected as one of your representatives.

There is also a way to launch them. However, what always bothered me was that this was just a fake application launch. You had to use the product editor all the time to keep the launch configs in sync. But over time I noticed some issues. Sometimes, when updating target platforms, something gets out of sync, features will be missing, whatever. Your launch is broken and the guys start to line up next to my desk.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice to just launch products all the time and have them 100% like they should be all the time including automatic validation of missing features (even included once) and plug-ins?

Oh yes! If you need this, just install my Patches for PDE (via Help -> Install New Software…). I published a new version in my repository (http://eclipseguru.org/). The relevant patch is attached to bug 326059.

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“.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Look: