All posts by Gunnar Wagenknecht

Building web applications with EclipseRT

EclipseCon,

No plans for Monday morning? Interested in learning building web apps with EclipseRT? If you are around Santa Clara on Monday March 21st then please join us at EclipseCon!

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!

Eclipse Board Elections – Please Vote!

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Voting is now open for the Eclipse Board of Directors. I was thrilled when I got the mail that I’ve been nominated. I’ve been involved with Eclipse for a long time and as I stated in my position paper it’s an amazing community. You can browse the list of candidates and read more about each candidate on the Eclipse.org website.

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.

True Product Based Launches

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I like Eclipse product configurations. Did I say that before? I use them a lot. They are a great way to assemble your final bits. PDE Build, Buckminster and soon Tycho are able to take them and put the stuff together. You’ll get a final zip that’s ready to hand out to consumers.

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.

Some patches for PDE to share

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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“.

Eclipse DemoCamp Jena

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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.