Eclipse ESE 2010 and STP News

Nov 1, 2010

Eclipse ESE 2010 w00t!

Eclipse ESE 2010 starts tomorrow, and I'm going to be there - well, I'll be there from Wednesday to Friday. I'm delighted, because I had written it off this year, having had to dramatically scale down my Eclipse community involvement. But with the help of Herr Program Chair Bernd, and cheap Eurozone flights, I'll be helping whip the room into shape in the Build Systems Exposed: Strengths & Weaknesses of Build Technologies at Eclipse panel discussion. Present will be the usual suspects, Henrik "Buck" Lindberg, Jason "Tycho" van Zyl and Nick "Athena" Boldt. Unfortunately, the fourth stooge, Dave "Agile" Carver, is being held incommunicado by his cats and can't make it. The point of the session is to help you, the attendee Eclipse developer, to get your brain-gear about how to make your projects build, get tested and get packaged. Questions are very important in this regard. Bring 'em.

For myself, I'm too long in the tooth and cynical to insist that there is one true path here, that one of the approaches is the best in all cases. I've been in Enterprise Software for the last 17 years, you see. In any case you have to do your own research as to what will work for you - I want you to consider this as school homework. No-one is going to do your assignment for you, because every project is different, and frankly, you need to learn how this stuff works or else you will be doomed next time around. Put it into the schedule.

Maybe that came across a little cranky. I've been on both sides of the issue and neither is comfortable, but I think you do have to learn it yourself for the knowledge to stick, so you can maintain it. However, that doesn't mean I think everyone needs to start from scratch - there's a base level of mechanics that can be given as an exemplar from which people can extrapolate. Lots of examples exist for this particular sphere of issues, so what I would really like to see would be The Eclipse Ultimate Guide To Building Eclipse By Example, which would take N types of Eclipse project and for each one show the M different ways to build it. A way to kick off would be to take Wayne's article on building Woolsey with Tycho and do a similar one on building Woolsey with Buckminster (or Athena).

In any case, looking forward to getting there and reminding myself how good German beer can be!

Eclipse STP News

The Eclipse SOA top-level project is now up and running pretty much completely, and with that the merge of the Swordfish and the projects contained by the Eclipse STP top-level project is complete. More than complete, in fact, with the addition of the eBPM, eBAM and Java Workflow Tooling projects, there's a comprehensive and diverse range of solutions available. Now, there is merely tidying up to do, and the remaining strands of connective tissue (build, web, etc) that kept those projects in place in STP needs to be removed. With this message to the STP and SOA PMCs I've initiated that process. Congrats to all projects on their move to Eclipse SOA and best of luck to the combined Tools + Runtime top-level project!

OSGi Training in Dublin

Sep 7, 2010

The ISA-Skillnet folks have set up a rare local opportunity for people to get some insights into the world of OSGi on Thursday this week (9th September) at the IBEC offices on Lower Baggot St. The inimitable Ian Bull, the lead for the Eclipse Zest visualization toolkit and an Equinox p2 committer will be doing the pitch. Ian knows his onions when it comes to this material and if you are looking for a solid explanation of why OSGi exists, what it does and how you can use it to structure your Java development and enforce runtime component isolation, you should get your carcass over to this talk, which is free to anyone who works for an Software Skillnet member company - list of members here (PDF link). You could get your company to join up, or just email them an ask about individual access.

Here’s the announcement: http://www.isa-skillnet.com/Training_Courses/88#ss162. The show starts at 1745.

Eclipse Quickie: Changing Buckminster Build To Use Git

Jun 15, 2010

Question: So, you are building a gaggle of projects that use Subversion, and one of them pops up and decides that distributed source code management is now the future and that they have moved to Git. You have a Buckminster build system - what do you do?

Answer: Make a simple change to your RMAP file as follows and just carry on as usual.

Before: we discover the source code of the BPMN Modeler from its Subversion repository.

[sourcecode language="xml"] <searchPath name="bpmn.plugins"> <provider readerType="svn" componentTypes="osgi.bundle" mutable="false" source="true"> <uri format="http://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/stp/org.eclipse.stp.bpmn-modeler/org.eclipse.stp.bpmn/trunk/{0}"> <bc:propertyRef key="buckminster.component" /> </uri> </provider> </searchPath> [/sourcecode]

After: we discover the source code of the BPMN Modeler from its Git repository.

[sourcecode language="xml"] <searchPath name="bpmn.plugins"> <provider readerType="git" componentTypes="osgi.bundle,eclipse.feature" resolutionFilter=""> <uri format="{0}/bpmnmodeler,{1}"> <bc:propertyRef key="workspace.root" /> <bc:propertyRef key="buckminster.component" /> </uri> <property key="git.remote.uri" value="git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/bpmnmodeler"/> <property key="git.remote.name" value="bpmnmodeler"/> </provider> </searchPath> [/sourcecode]

Look for: the readerType has changed to git, there's a change in the uri format, and we've been required to add a couple of new property key-value pairs. Then it works first time (for me at least!). You will need the 3.6 Buckminster stream to get the git readerType - download information is here.

I have to say a big thank-you to the Buckminster Team for this piece of software that not only powers the STP build, but also the construction of the complete Helios release!