Category Archives: Eclipse

Eclipse is one of the greates platforms I ever worked with. I’m a committing member of the Eclipse Foundation. This category will collect everything about Eclipse, the Rich Client Platform, SWT, GEF and other related projects.

Eclipse Bundle Recipes

Eclipse

The Eclipse Bundle Recipes project (EBR) was created with the intention to develop and host a technology and recipes for creating OSGi bundles out of regular non-OSGi Java libraries. Unfortunately, not a lot has happened after it’s creation. Frankly, as the Git repository and the history unveils, it has been just a code drop of the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository recipes. I’m here to change that!

As an Orbit committer, it’s has been my pleasure to convert Java libraries to OSGi for quite some time now. If you know how Orbit bundles are created, you know it’s an exercise. Thus, I also have a high motivation for the Eclipse EBR project to be successful. Last week was one of those where I looked at upgrading a few of the Orbit bundles I’m maintaining. Turns out, the libraries are actually quite active and – as every good OS project does these days – they also release very frequently. That’s really turning into a boring exercise. Thus, I decided to craft together a process that would simplify things for me.

The result is very promising. With just one nice little Maven plug-in I created, a small Maven POM and an OSGi BND descriptor file I’m now able to consume the libraries directly from Maven central (or whatever Maven repo they come from), push them through a filtering step which may remove or add files, generate the OSGi manifest headers, add p2 metadata information and deploy them back into a Maven repository (eg. a local one). Then, in a second step, I’ll let Tycho run and it creates a p2 repository where the bundles are published together with a source bundle containing the library source code. Done.

Over the next few days I’m hoping to make that available in the EBR Git repository. For the time being I pushed it to Github*[1]. I first need to review the dependencies and push them through the Eclipse.org IP process. Once that is done, we should have a pretty neat solution for EBR. However, remember that EBR will only host and distribute the recipes, not the actual libraries. You have to generate them yourself.

For Eclipse projects, this is where Orbit comes back into the game. Orbit can take and run the recipes of all IP approved libraries from EBR (or create its own) and publish the bundles as today in p2 repositories.

Stay tuned!

[1]: Update, Feb. 28

I pushed the Maven plug-in as well as the first recipes to the Eclipse Git repository. You can browse them at git.eclipse.org GitHub.

2nd Update, July 8 2015

The EBR project is available at github.com/eclipse/ebr. Submit pull requests for all the recipes you create!

Bringing the Eclipse IDE forward

Eclipse, ,

How do we do it?

We tax for committership!

Seriously?

Let’s charge 300 bucks!

Nooooo!

On one hand, the investment into the Eclipse IDE of existing, long-time contributors is declining. There might be plenty of reasons for that. But over time, this decline in investment has become visible to the users of Eclipse – developers that use it every day to get their job done. Personally, I’m missing innovation in things that really makes up a great IDE. Well, some might say that innovation happens in the web these days. Desktop IDEs are boring.

Really? Because on the other hand, there are many companies out there which are spending quite a bit of money on licenses for commercial desktop IDEs every year! Thus, I’m wondering if some of those companies would rather spend a similar amount or a bit less on Eclipse? Do you care about developers? Imagine there is a team of experienced people with a great vision on the Eclipse IDE available that is seeking for funding. Imagine that with your funding, you can not only contribute to a sustainable future of the Eclipse IDE but also participate in making decisions on how this future should look like. Now I’m telling you, that you don’t even need to hire developers for that!

This idea of leveraging an industry working group for bringing the Eclipse IDE forward has been circulating around for some time now. I finally sat down and put together a proposal for an Eclipse IDE industry working group.

Industry working groups at Eclipse are an easy way for companies to efficiently work together on a common goal. I’m looking for feedback and interested parties! Does that idea sound interesting? What aspects of the proposal do you like and which not at all? How much would you be willing to spend? What kind of participation do you like? What is missing and should be covered?

There are plenty of questions. Please don’t hesitate and reach out to me (@guw or gunnar at wagenknecht dot org) or subscribe to the ide-dev mailing list and join our discussions! There are also two interesting sessions at EclipseCon Europe that you should join: Making the Eclipse IDE fun again and an Eclipse IDE BoF.

Time to vote!

Eclipse

It’s the time of the year again when the Eclipse Foundation calls all committers to cast their votes. Each year members of the board are elected for representing two very important groups of the community at Eclipse!

Important Dates 2013

IMO this is one of the best ways to allow the community to participate and make its voice heard. Topics such as committer tools (Git, Bugzilla & co) and improvements to the IP process (such as parallel IP, incubation) are discussed at the board resulting into plans/directions for the Eclipse Foundation to implement.

My vision and my goals for 2013 are available online on my candidate page. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate and send them to me.

Two days ago webmaster sent out an email to all committers with voting credentials.

vote-email

 

Please don’t miss this chance to make your voice heard and vote now. I would be pleased to receive yours.

eclipse-voted

Thanks!

On my way to JavaOne 2012

Eclipse, Travel, , ,

For the first time ever I’ll be attending JavaOne next week. I’ll speak together with Shaun Smith from Oracle about Polyglot Persistence with EclipseLink JPA.

Polyglot Persistence: EclipseLink JPA for NoSQL, Relational, and Beyond
(Tuesday, Oct 2, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM – Parc 55 – Cyril Magnin I) 

Yes, there will be a demo running EclipseLink on Gyrex OSGi connecting to MongoDB. 🙂

I’m currently in Frankfurt  waiting at the gate. I’ll arrive Friday night in San Francisco and will stay till next Friday (Oct. 5th). If you are around, interested in a chat (about runtimes, OSGi, other stuff that matters) and/or want to grab a beer please ping me!