Planet Eclipse (beta)

Headless build problems with Grouped Configurations

2008-10-28T22:06:43Z

PDE/Build has a property named groupConfigurations. If you set this property, build will group all the configurations (ie win32,win32,x86 & gtk,linux,x86) into one archive instead of creating a separate archive per configuration.

Kim & I, while working to get the performance baselines going, found a couple of gotchas/bugs around the use of this property.

Unexpected archive format for the group

The first thing we noticed was that the group archive was being created using ant's zip task instead of using the native zip as expected. Our builder's build.properties specified the following:

configs = *,*,*
archivesFormat = *,*,*-zip
groupConfigurations = true

If we had read the documentation, we would have seen that the archivesFormat is ignored for groups. However, this is not strictly true, and we can instead set a format for the group directly:

configs=*,*,*
archivesFormat = group,group,group-zip
groupConfigurations = true

This results in the zip format as desired.

The directory group.group.group does not exist

We also ran into the following error:

/builds/src/assemble.org.eclipse.sdk.tests.group.group.group.xml:257: The directory
/builds/src/tmp/eclipse/group.group.group does not exist

This turns out to be a rather old bug. The problem is that when features gather together the rootfiles they contribute, they copy them into platform specific folders. In this case, building the *,*,* configuration, the rootfiles were copied into tmp/ANY.ANY.ANY. However, because of the way the grouped configurations feature is implemented, the assembly scripts end up looking for the rootfiles in the group.group.group folder.

There are a few workarounds to this problem. One is to stick a mkdir in your customTarget/allElements assemble..group.group.group target. This avoids the error, but you don't get the rootfiles in your group archive.

If you are using 3.4, then you can use the pre.archive target in customAssembly.xml to collect all the rootfiles into the correct folder:

   
      
                     todir="${rootFolder}" failonerror="false"/>
                     todir="${rootFolder}" failonerror="false" />
                     todir="${rootFolder}" failonerror="false" />

The ${rootFolder} property is defined by the caller of the pre.archive target, and in this case will be ${eclipse.base}/group.group.group/${collectingFolder}.

As usual, I have not actually tried running the above ant, the details may be different.

Fly Scala!

2008-10-28T21:23:13Z

Porting the Java client library for the Fly Object Space to Scala.

WTP Incubator Updates

2008-10-28T19:32:50Z

We have a couple more WTP Incubator projects getting ready to ramp up now that the committers have made it through the gauntlet of paperwork and sign offs.

XML Security Tools - Dominik Schadow is the original author and will be coming on board as a WTP committer to continue the work he started. The set of plugins helps with the implementation and testing of the W3C XML Encryption and Digital Signature specifications. Dominik has been working on this set of plugins for several years as a sourceforge project. I asked if he would like to make it an official eclipse project and he was up for the challenge.
XQuery Development Tools - This one you have heard about on and off. Buddhika Laknath was a google summer of code student, that I helped mentor over the summer. He contributed his project to WTP and will be coming on board to continue the development of this very much needed piece in the XML tool chain.

Both of these guys will make a good addition to the growing XML suite of tools at eclipse. There is still a need for additonal XML tools, and all of the incubating projects are looking for help and code contributions.

VEX Update:

In the way of VEX, we are still inching closer and closer to where we can get some automated builds going. The big hold back right now is updating VEX so that it is aware of the WTP DOM as well as it's own. Ed is guiding me in the ways of the modeling force, so I hope to have a workable solution using the EMF2SSEDOM api provided by WTP. Right now I do have the VEX document model loading from DOMModel, so we are closer to having the two talking. Also, there is some work from the user community on enhanced DocBook and DITA support. Like the other incubating projects, VEX could use some community help as right now it's a two person show.

Actuate’s Open Source Business Strategy

2008-10-28T18:48:10Z

We just finished the Eclipse Marketing Symposium at Eclipse World. One of my favourite presentation was by Rich Guth from Actuate. Rich did a great job describing the Actuate open source business strategy and the success they are having with BIRT Exchange.

Some highlights:

- Actuate generated $8 million in revenue from OS activities in 2007 and are on track to double in 2008.

- The BIRT Exchange site is successfully driving down the cost of lead generation to $50 per qualified lead, as compared to hundreds of dollars for a traditional marketing approach.

- Currently converting 1% of Eclipse BIRT users into Actuate customers but they hope to raise this significantly.

- Actuate’s core market is in the financial services industry. However, their open source strategy has introduced them ito new industries such as manufacturing, telecom, retail and hostpitality. In fact, 75% of BIRT users are outside of Actuate’s traditional industries.

I really appreciate Rich and Actuate sharing some of their business strategy. Rich’s presentation slides are online and we have written a case study about Actuate’s success. If you are developing an open source strategy for your company, I would highly recommend taking a look.

Delegation vs. Inheritance

2008-10-28T16:10:25Z

The question "how do I change the type of my object" in JPA comes up now and then because developers know that an object's class is typically derived from an discriminator column on the database. They reason that if they can change the column value then class of the object can be changed. But it's not that simple.

What you're really trying to do is to change the class of an Entity object. Obviously this isn't something supported by Java nor by JPA. In EclipseLink it may be possible to hammer a discriminator column, invalidate the affected object in the cache, and then reread it. That could work but with a large number of caveats including ensuring you hold no references to the transformed object in your persistence context.

Instead, I'd suggest that if your domain model includes the ability to change the class of an Entity you refactor your model to use a delegation/role modeling approach rather than using inheritance. This allows you to change roles at runtime and even to have multiple concurrent roles (e.g., person could have a fireman role as well as a spouse role) and would behave accordingly.

Here's a simple example:

public enum PetType {
    CAT   { String speak() { return "meow"; } },
    DOG { String speak() { return "woof"; } };
    abstract String speak();
  }

@Entity
public class Pet {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private int id;
    private String name;

    public Pet() {
    }

    public Pet(String name) {
        super();
        this.name = name;
    }
    @Enumerated
    private PetType type = PetType.CAT;

        ...
    public String speak() {
        return this.getType().speak();
    }
}

        em.getTransaction().begin();
        Pet pet = new Pet("fluffy");
        System.out.println(pet.getName() + " is a " + pet.getType().toString() + " and says " + pet.speak());
        em.persist(pet);
        em.getTransaction().commit();

        em.getTransaction().begin();
        pet = em.find(Pet.class, pet.getId());
        pet.setType(PetType.DOG);
        System.out.println(pet.getName() + " is now a " + pet.getType().toString() + " and says " + pet.speak());
        em.getTransaction().commit();

fluffy is a CAT and says meow
[EL Fine]: Connection(27582163)--UPDATE SEQUENCE SET SEQ_COUNT = SEQ_COUNT + ? WHERE SEQ_NAME = ?
bind => [50, SEQ_GEN]
[EL Fine]: Connection(27582163)--SELECT SEQ_COUNT FROM SEQUENCE WHERE SEQ_NAME = ?
bind => [SEQ_GEN]
[EL Fine]: Connection(27582163)--INSERT INTO PET (ID, NAME, TYPE) VALUES (?, ?, ?)
bind => [101, fluffy, 0]
fluffy is now a DOG and says woof
[EL Fine]: Connection(27582163)--UPDATE PET SET TYPE = ? WHERE (ID = ?)
bind => [1, 101]

One more thing

You could also implement methods on the PetType that took the Pet object and called back to the appropriate Pet method depending on the PetType. All in all this is a pretty flexible solution.

Ontario Linux Fest 2008

2008-10-28T14:34:08Z

This past Saturday was the Ontario Linux Fest 2008. It was a great event again this year. Thanks to John, Richard, and all of the organizers. Along with Nick Boldt — who recently joined Red Hat, yay! — I ran an Eclipse booth. This year felt a lot more positive for the Eclipse booth. We had lots of people come by who said they were using Eclipse in various areas (PHP, Java, C++, etc.) and a lot of curious people ask what Eclipse was and how they could use it. In the future, we should try to have CDs of EPP packages or something to give away as many people asked how they could get it and having to tell them to download it is one more barrier to them trying it out. Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation for sponsoring the booth and providing some shirts and fleeces. We gave a few away and sold some others to people, giving them Friends of Eclipse memberships.

Lynn told me the sign had a rough year and she was right! It looks like it may have been bleached by the sun or something. This picture only shows one person but we really did have quite a few!

The Fedora booth was right next to the Eclipse booth so I was able to see the activity there first hand. It seemed a lot more popular than last year as well and just like last year all of the DVDs were gone by the end of the day. Having a good crowd of people — Deepak, Behdad, Yaakov, Greg, and Paul — helped to attract others as did the ever-popular XOs.

Behdad also brought his brother’s new Thinkpad x61 tablet which is really cool! We played around with the GIMP — pressure sensitivity + colour changing! — and xournal — snap to shapes and PDF annotations! — and people were really impressed that it was all running off of an F10 USB stick with persistence.

The new Fedora event kit — think “everything you need for a conference in a box” — is awesome! The posters and signs were great and having a ready-to-use XO really completes the picture. A big kudos to Behdad and Brian Powell for meeting each other in Niagara Falls to pass of the event kit.

It was great meeting everyone and I hope we can be back with both organizations next year.

Eclipse Planning Council

2008-10-28T10:29:17Z

I have a new video camera that I’ve brought to Eclipse World. I hope to talk to a number of people at the conference about what they do with Eclipse.

In this video, we talk to different members of the Eclipse Planning Council that met here at Eclipse World. We asked them what was the most important thing they discussed during the meeting.

Listen in..

On Separation Anxiety...

2008-10-28T04:06:49Z

You gotta keep 'em separated. Or so says conventional wisdom (and the song). One of the homework items for this week's UML Roadmap working group meeting was to propose a solution to the 'separation of concerns' problem in UML. I would argue that this, like many other problems with UML, is actually a symptom of more fundamental issues with the way specifications are defined/developed at the OMG, and that we ought to address these issues before it’s too late (if it isn’t already).

The bottom line is that the status quo will no longer suffice. Design by committee and vendor politics won't get us anywhere. Neither will closedness and opaqueness. In his webinar on ecosystem development the week before last, Mike suggested that ecosystems could be evaluated on the basis of five key concepts (see below). In order for the ecosystem of specifications (languages) that exists at the OMG to survive, I'd say its health in these areas needs to be measured and improved.

Co-evolved innovation. There's certainly a lot of innovation happening at the OMG, and by a lot of players. But sometimes I wonder how relevant the innovation is (in the absence of reference implementations) and how coordinated the activities are (sometimes chairing a task force seems a lot more like cat-herding than coordinated evolution).

Alignment of Vision. The OMG has a vision - MDA (Model Driven Architecture). But how aligned are the various OMG specifications with this vision? How long will the industry wait for it to be realized?

Degree of openness. The OMG is an open organization, in the sense that its reason for being is to produce open specifications. But its processes are less open than other organizations like Eclipse, and that has garnered it some negative press. To borrow from Bjorn's analogy, I think the OMG would benefit from being an openness bear that's "just right".

Degree of modularity. I think this is at the heart of the 'separation of concerns' problem. Languages like UML and its relatives are in fact designed to be modular - they're structured as sets of packages, or "capabilities" and then merged into various compliance levels... but something went wrong along the way, because subsets of these languages aren't as reusable as they were originally intended to be.

A network of niches. A set of vertices without edges is not a graph - it's just a set of vertices. I think many of the niches (UML, BPMN, IMM) are falling into place at the OMG; now, we just need to connect the dots.

Mike also talked about the importance of an open, extensible platform as the basis for a successful ecosystem. I think that's what's missing in the OMG ecosystem. Yes, it has MOF, but that's not a platform on its own; MOF is to the OMG as OSGi is to Eclipse. The OMG needs a platform (a working version of what the InfrastructureLibrary in UML was intended to be) upon which MOF-based languages can be built.

So, here's what I think should be done to solve the 'separation of concerns' problem in UML. Direct the renewed interest and energy in "fixing" UML toward defining a platform of shared concepts upon which UML (and other specifications like BPMN and IMM) can be based. Implement (yes, implement!) a proof a concept that demonstrates the benefits of refactoring UML based on this platform using mechanisms from the emerging Diagram Definition and Semantic MOF specifications, and extrapolate to infer how the same benefits could be reaped by other specifications like BPMN and IMM. Then, and only then, submit responses to the RFPs for Diagram Definition, Semantic MOF (MOF 3.0?), and UML 3.0.

Some say that making changes like this will only serve to disrupt the industry, to scare away the vendors and users once and for all ("they waited forever for UML 2.0; if we propose UML 3.0, we'll lose them for good!"). That's just FUD, if you ask me and, well, desparate times call for desparate measures. The way to avoid this disruption is to make the changes in a more open and transparent way than before, for example, in a project at Eclipse. Of course, we'd try to maintain backward compatibility if at all possible or, at the very least, provide an explicit migration path for existing tools. But let the (proven) technology speak for itself. If we build it, they will come. The time is now.

News about UFacekit

2008-10-27T21:18:32Z

There are some important news I'd like to share with all of you:

1. UFacekit Proposal

The proposal is out and we hope some of you are interested in the targets and ideas we follow with UFacekit. If you are please leave a note on the newly created newsgroup. Share your wishes, critism with us so that we can make UFacekit a success.

2. QT-Port

Just a few minutes ago I checked in a first running version of a QT-Port of the UFacekit-API. Besides providing this API we naturally provide bundles you can consume standalone (e.g. to only use a JFace-Viewer-API in QT-Jambi-Projects, ...).

So we now have:

Support for SWT/JFace

Support for Swing

Support for QT (Cleanlooks Style)

Platforms I'd like to see a port in future:

GWT - is going to be revived soon by one of the team-members
- GXT
- Other UI-Toolkits based upon GWT

Eclipse-Forms - Should be fairly easy to do

Android - The first test suggest it is possible though we need to see if all widget types are available. Maybe we can only provide some viewer and UI-Observables but not a full fledged UFace-API

Platforms I dream of a port in future:

Draw2d

OpenGL

DCK

2008-10-27T20:10:43Z

The demo camp season is starting. Starting on October 27 and ending in early December, there's a ton of demo camps scheduled.

In Europe, one can go and attend demo camps in Germany (6), Poland (3), France (2), Hungary (2). One demo camp per country we'll find in Cyprus, Romania, Denmark, Turkey, Luxembourg, UK, Bulgaria, Netherlands and Russia.

I'm planning to attend as many of the demo camps as I can (as my schedule and if my travel budget allows for). My first visit will be in Karlsruhe on Thursday. 75 people have registered and got a seat, another 25 are wait-listed. Does that mean Eclipse Foundation employees will have to take on bouncer duties in the future?

So yes. I am impressed. And I want to invite these people out after the demo camp. They must be thirsty. So let's have a Stammtisch in Karlsruhe after the demo camp. Here is the link for registration. You'll also find place and time there – please let us know if you plan to come!

See you on Thursday.

Ralph

BIRT Properties

2008-10-27T19:45:49Z

If you have done much API level programming with BIRT you have probably found yourself in need of the name and values for a property. This happens if you are working with either the Java or JavaScript modes of BIRT.

The good thing is that the properties that are used in BIRT are defined someplace in the Java code. The hard part is finding exactly where the definition has been placed. I have created a crib sheet with the classes that contain the most common property names on the wiki. You can take a look here .

If you have been working with the BIRT APIs and have found similar information that might be useful, please feel free to update the wiki with your hints.

50,000 Zips

2008-10-27T18:49:33Z

Since turning on Google Analytics for tracking Modeling project zips on September 15, we've gotten over 50,000 pageviews (33,000 unique) of the download tracker. While this doesn't necessarily mean every one of those hits resulted in a download, it certainly shows a lot of interest in downloading EMF, UML2, UML2 Tools, GMF, Query, OCL, and XSD, to name but a few of the more than two dozen Modeling Project components.

Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface -- most of our downloads come from EPP bundles and update sites. But thanks to bug 239668, we will one day be able to track downloads done via p2. If download stats interest you, please vote for bug 239668.

Windows Azure: Microsoft's Cloud OS

2008-10-27T17:50:20Z

Windows Azure is Microsoft's entry into the Cloud OS space, if there is one. It is a direct competitor for Amazon's Cloud setup. Whats interesting is that Eclipse is mentioned as "Coming Soon" as a development tool. Nice.

But Cloud OS? I am not sure about it. But I guess we will be pulled into it if we like it or not.

Goldilocks and The Three Bears of Openness

2008-10-27T15:45:49Z

Once upon a time, there were Three Bears of Openness. Goldilocks (the fair haired boy or girl wanting to be an Eclipse committer) wandered up to their house/Foundation on the web and looked around.

The first bear she encountered was not open at all; in fact, one could say that he was closed. All of his deliberations and decisions were made in private and he used Eclipse as a source code repository for his private code base. True, his code was "open" because it was all there in the repository, but none of his deliberations, conversations, plans, or decisions were open or transparent. Nobody joined his project and it as eventually blown away by a strong breeze.

The second bear she encountered was too open: much like those drunk college student pics one finds on Facebook - TMI! Everything was open and transparent, so much so that the mailing lists and IRC channels were useless with random chatter. Worse, with all that openness, nobody would risk a publicly negative statement and so the project was drifting towards feature bloat and failure.

The third bear she encountered was just right - open and transparent, but not too open and transparent. Phone meetings were held and minutes were kept, but the minutes were summaries, thus people were happy to express negative opinions and send up trial ballons without fear of being forever recorded in the Google archives as a negative nellie. Everyone in the community was welcomed into the meetings, honest discussions were held, and the project was moving nicely along towards fantastic success.

Goldilocks joined project three, of course.

So what is the correct level of openness for an open source project? In my time at the Foundation, I've been pushing for projects to be more open, more open, more open, but has that always been the right thing?... Open source clearly requires open discussion: it just doesn't function any other way. But the "archive for all time" nature of electronic discussions (wikis, forums, email lists, etc) does not create a healthy atmosphere for discussing difficult problems. The realization that anything one says could come back to haunt them in a future job interview (or even their upcoming run for Vice President of the United States!) is a big damper on the free and full flow of information and discussion around a project.

Konstantin brought this up last month in regards to elections: why aren't there more -1s? For anyone who has worked in a regular software company, we know that there are disagreements, often passionate, around design, hiring, features, ..., so why don't we see more of those disagreements on the Eclipse mailing lists? Are we harming the progress of Eclipse projects by insisting that everything, including dirty laundry, be done in public?

I've come to believe that our (my?) over emphasis on everything being open has not been entirely optimal: if everything we say (everything I say) is recorded for all time, we (I) am very, very hesitant to say anything negative. That's not good for the project and it's not good for the community. Without contradictory opinions, we end up with the Emperor's New Clothes... So I've come to believe that a balanced openness - unrecorded discussion followed by open and transparent minutes and conclusions - is probably the healthiest for an open source community, i.e., the Third Bear of Openness.

A Ray of Light for the Beautiful Game.

2008-10-27T13:32:12Z

For those that don't know, one of my hobbies is Refereeing soccer(football for the rest of the world). Particularly, I'm a State Level USSF Level 6 referee. What does this mean....it means that I get to spend a lot of time on the weekends from Mid March through Mid December on the soccer pitch. It also means I see a lot more of the negative side of the game, and am on the receiving end of much of the wraith of coaches and parents. I deal mostly with high level games now, but I still go back and do the youth games to help out the newer referees and do some education.

First let me say, that I do this not necessarily for the money (even though it helps). I do it for the LOVE OF THE GAME. I played when I was growing up, dropped the game for a period of time, and picked it back up again. I played until I got tired of trying to keep up with 21 year olds on the field, when I hit my 30s, but wanted to be involved with the game still. I thought the officiating was horrible, and that I should put my foot where my mouth was. So I signed up for class, passed and went to the field. Believe me when I say, that refereeing isn't that simple. You need to make a split second decision. For those that think it is simple, take the class, and go ref some games...I think you'll see your opinion change.

I've been doing this close to 8 years now, and will say one thing. Yes, there are many very bad refs out there. They don't move, they hardly ever leave the center circle, aren't in position to make a call, etc. However, the fault of these bad refs, does NOT give a specator of any youth game or any game, the right to berate a 14 year Assistant Referee or Center on on a U-10 girls game for blowing a call. What is even worse, is the language that can come out of these parents mouths. Oh and BTW, don't argue over a throw in...the ball typically goes right back to the other team 10 seconds later.

The problem I see here is that we tend to loose focus of what should be important. Yes, I realize you are paying thousands of dollars a year to have your kid on a traveling select team. However, why are you doing it? Is it for the kid, or is it to try and live your dream through your kid. Now most of the parents are good...they do it for the right reasons....however what follows is about those that aren't.

Now, I typically stick to the higher level games, which is where I hear a lot of abuse. I suspect some noise from the specatators at these games, there is a lot on the line (college scouts, etc.). The most disgusting thing I saw, happened last year when I went back to do a local youth tournament. I was the center for a U-11 Boys Gold Division select championship game. It was a hot match for a U-11 with the kids playing hard. However, parents on each side argued and screamed at every call that they didn't like (I had one 14 year old ref unfortunately that had to be on the parents side). I addressed the situation with both the coach and specatotors so that the abuse was sent my way not the assitant refs way. Not half way through the game, two parents (one from each team) got into a fight on the side lines. It's a U-11 Boys game! It isn't the World Cup! Both were dismissed, and finished watching the game from the comfort of their cars.

A piece of advice to the parents...if you don't like the way the game is being called, or think the refs in your area are worthless. Take the Referring class available in your area. Do some games. Your view point will change. Not every shove is foul worthy, you aren't going to get the whistle blown everytime there is an apparent handball. I do agree that you should expect consistency in the calls. However, what you think you see on the sideline isn't necessarily what is truely happening. I know it opened my eyes when I started reffing. Also, please, please, go easy on the youth referees....it's hard enough for us to keep them interested in continuing to ref with everything else going on. We don't need verbal abuse by specators to help drive them away.

With all this said, I will say that I recently did a U-10 game, in which I thought the coach did an excellent job. She never screamed or talked down to her players, she was polite but still firm in expressing her opinion to the refs when she thought they were wrong. Most importantly though, she had the right attitude instilled not only into her players but her parents. So many thanks to the New Albany Freedom U-10 girls team, coached by Abbey Dehart. I wish more coaches and parents followed the example you and your team set.

It is these instances of the true spirit of the game that keep me going, to help strive an make the game as enjoyable as it can be. For done right, and played well...it truely is a beautiful game.

Eclipse DemoCamps

2008-10-27T13:13:06Z

It's that time of year again - demo time!

Being run for the third time, demo camps can be considered an integral part of the Eclipse calender of events. Attending a DemoCamp is great. If you haven't yet been to any Eclipse DemoCamp, let me briefly summarize why I think you should consider going to one:

see cool technology in action (well, that's the whole point of a DemoCamp, isn't it)
get to know Eclipse-minded people from your area
have some frosty beverages and fingerfood (well, that actually depends on how the camp is organized)
see some exciting buildings from inside (again, depends on how the camp is organized)

Oh, did I mention that Eclipse DemoCamps are free? Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and many sponsoring member companies, you get to enjoy all those nice things for absolutely free.

Here are some of my favorite demos:

Jingwen Owen Ou on WikiText for Mylyn
Jochen Krause on Eclipse 4.0
Harald Wellmann on Geodata Processing for Car Navigation Systems
Florian Fieber and Max Bureck on From Model to Code - A Comparison of M2M and M2T Technologies in Eclipse Modeling
Dave Savage on Newton - a distributed OSGi application runtime
Jens von Pilgrim on GEF goes 3D: GEF3D
Eike Steppe on CDO Model Repository
Boris Bokowski and Eric Moffatt on the e4 Programming Model and e4 Modeled UI, respectively
Martin Taal on EMF/Teneo

By the way, if we were to award the price of the most indefatigable DemoCamp presenter, it'd go to Wassim Melhem. You can meet him at no less than three locations: Iasi (Romania), Warszawa (Poland), Poznan (Poland).

Hope I could convince you to attend one of the many DemoCamps. I'll be at the DemoCamps in Hamburg and Leipzig, so see you there!

Eclipse Photoshop Challenge: "Better Than MovieOS"

2008-10-27T07:32:32Z

Back in June, we ran a contest to challenge the Eclipse community to photoshop some movie-themed posters to promote Ganymede.

This time, I'd like to propose a different challenge.

What: An opportunity to show your Photoshoppin' / GIMPin' skillz. Top five community-voted submissions will win Eclipse schwag.
When: Now through mid-November.
Why: Because Eclipse is better than MovieOS.
Who: Anyone with some free time to burn.
Where: On your blog, or attached to bug 252135.

So, what should you design? The rules are simple. Take a still frame from a movie or TV show, and replace the MovieOS with a screenshot of an Eclipse IDE running your favourite plugins, an RCP or SWT application, or even a mobile OSGi app.

Some links to get you started:

Some examples:

NYC, ITEA, DCK and other Abbreviations

2008-10-27T07:29:29Z

It's getting harder to keep track of all the abbreviations. When I look up my calendar (I'm a happy Google calendar user now, with integration into my Thunderbird mail client – thanks to the Eclipse Webmasters), it sometimes takes me a while to remember what they stand for.

Just take NYC. In my Eclipse life context, the abbreviation actually stands for (Eclipse) Now-You Can. It is the name of the "Eclipse Day" event that Eliane Fourgeau from Geensys has been running in Paris for the 3rd year. And what a great event it was this year! As you can see from the agenda, they were putting together a pretty good program. And they were not alone: Quite a number of sponsors were attracted and helped to offset the cost. When I counted the participants over lunch time I ended up with a number around 120. Success? Eliane is a little frustrated. She says she needs other Parisienne companies to step up and help with the organization. Is there anybody out there?

Next entry on my agenda: “ITEA2”. As you very likely know, ITEA is an European R&D programme named “Information Technology for European Advancement”. At the Rotterdam Artemis & ITEA Co-Summit Sylvie Roberts from Airbus, who organized a session discussing the role of FLOSS in the context, had invited me to present the Eclipse Foundation. The goal of the session was to demonstrate that the role of FLOSS provides a good basis for the creation of Innovation Networks.

My task was to discuss Eclipse as a place where various organizations (industry, research, ISVs and other players) find the opportunity to collaboratively develop solutions for the problems the industries are facing.

To my big surprise, quite a number of people showed up for our side show. First, a speaker from AdaCore in Paris presented how AdaCore, a true FLOSS based company, has been growing in a difficult market for many years now. After my talk, Sylvie Robert from Airbus outlined the reasons behind Airbus' decision to apply FLOSS mechanisms for the production and maintenance of their embedded tool chain (TOPCASED). It was good to hear that more and more TOPCASED tools are actually used in production. Last talk in the session came from David Sciamma from Anyware Technologies in Toulouse. He presented an overview over the OPEES initiative. I believe OPEES would be a great initiative to host at Eclipse. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any references to OPEES on the net – David, can you help?

The ride home was fun. It took me just over 4 hours by train: Rotterdam and Frankfurt are well-connected in the trans-European railway network. From station to station I the conductor's announcements became more animated. I think he and some co-travelers had a good time in bar car. He never showed up to check my ticket

You have noticed that DCK is missing? Wait for my next blog!

Ralph

What I’ll be attending at Eclipse World

2008-10-27T00:27:58Z

Tomorrow I head to Eclipse World and after doing so much training I’m really looking forward to sitting and listening to others for a change! I am going to be doing a few presentations at the conference, but in this post I wanted to focus on what I’ll be attending next week.

Converting Your Applications From Swing to SWT and the RCP

This topic is becoming increasingly important to my clients. I’ve seen more than a few projects that are trying to leverage existing AWT/Swing resources as they migrate to RCP and are struggling with how to do this properly.

Creating Graphical Editors and Views Using Eclipse GEF

I’ve used GEF occasionally over the past few years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to hear it described in a systematic way. I’m also excited to hear some more about Zest, which I’d love to start using in upcoming projects.

RAP or GWT: Which Java-Based AJAX Technology Is for You?

RIA technologies look to become central to future Eclipse architectures (see the e4 project for the details). I have to admit I’m still somewhat ambivalent about thin-clients and would rather see rich clients with awesome provisioning support instead.

Java UI Testing Patterns and Best Practices

UI testing is always problematic and I think approaching this topic from a patterns and best-practices angle makes a lot of sense. I’m particularly interested in ways to create UIs that are designed to be testable.

So that’s what I’ll be attending this year, and if you see me at the conference be sure to stop me and say hi. And if anyone is interested in having a beer or something, just let me know!

Why a good platform can't be free

2008-10-26T21:17:01Z

I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.

In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.

You know, I have no problem with that. As I've stated in the past, complex algorithms are hard to get right and multimedia is complex to get good quality results. And I don't blame the creators of this work wanting to get something out of it. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't have created it to begin with and we'd be waiting for some kind soul to donate this for free. Wishful thinking I'd think.

But you know, the costs aren't that bad. One I was looking at was the DVD format licensing. There is a company in Japan that controls this and their pricing information is here. It's about $5K for the book (under NDA), $15K for the license, then another $10K or so for verification. That's not too bad if you're selling thousands of units. But it's also not zero. And the NDA also prevents the implementation from being open source to begin with anyway.

And there are similar fees for the very popular MP3, (minimum $15K). Blu-ray is similar. And some of these are yearly fees. So as you can see, if you want to produce a multimedia platform you can redistribute, the costs are non-zero. So why do people expect these platforms to cost zero...

Giving open source a unusual try

2008-10-26T10:17:11Z

Open source is great! Thats what I truly think.
But there are still many areas that are quite untouched by the open source model, or where it is at least not really successful. For example I did some amount of research on open source ERP software in the last months and I came to the conclusion that theres nothing in open source land out there I would really recommend . (You are welcome to correct me there :)
Open source is very successful on components right now. But what about business software in general or software for special business lines ? I am running a small RCP based project in business software specialized for publishing companies. At least I'm trying to get it started. We are still in an early stage, and theres lots of stuff still missing. But whats the hardest point up to now is growing a community. I don't mean a developer community, but a user community that gives feedback. When I started to work actively on public relations for the project, I found out that many of my potential users had no clue about open source and got at least very suspicious when I told them that the software is free. For me I think that an open source model could be a great opportunity for industries to build software of many kinds in a collaborative way. But time has to tell if managers out there are getting the ideas. I'm still positive, we have three production installation by today and I hope it will grow.

When you invest in a so called "standard software" product today, what many companies find out is, that standard business software needs customization (oh yeah) and the real cost of going live is something vendors (don't want to blame anyone) don't really tell. In many cases you are tied to experts that come at high rates from the vendors. If companies can gather up to a community, they could have much more influence and control over the software they are going to use, they could have they're own in house know how if they wish to -from the beginning- and they could fix a bug when they need to. And not have to wait for the next major release (if the bug got fied at all). I could count up many more advantages. So what do you think, will open source be a model for "standard business software products" ?

Google mentor summit is on!

2008-10-25T18:19:26Z

Greetings from Mountain View, Google HQ in California! Summit is on and sessions scheduled. There is a lot of fun going on and I’ll try to get some of it here, stay tuned! I’m here representing Eclipse Foundation as one of the organizations participating in Google Summer of Code. Eclipse had a lot of strong summer of code [...]

My first screencast: export a project in Eclipse

2008-10-25T09:40:25Z

I just created my first screencast. It is meant to help our users export their projects properly in an Eclipse environment.

The quality is not perfect, I will work on that for the next ones.

You can find this screencast on the Intalio community website.

UPDATE: I have moved from embedding a single screencast to using a Youtube playlist. I have updated this page with the embedded playlist. Have fun!

MDSD Today 2008 Recap

2008-10-25T06:42:47Z

From October 15 to October 17, MDSD Today 2008 took place at the Nordakademie in Elmshorn near Hamburg, Germany. The conference, which had been organized by Frank Zimmermann (Nordakademie), Simon Zambrovski and yours truly, was intended to bring together practioners, researchers and people from both industry and business.

We were fortunate enough to aquire a number of well-known speakers, most notably Axel Uhl (SAP) and Ed Merks (of EMF fame).

On the first day, Axel and Ed delivered their excellent keynotes on the current state of affairs in modeling.

Ed commented on a number of misconceptions he has been confronted with during the last few years such as "modeling is too complicated", "modeling will just get into my way" or "modeling will limit my creativity". The bottom line of his talk was that although you might not realize it, models drive most software (just think of all the data models you're dealing with in business applications). However, using source code as a representation for your models might not always be the best solution - to gain both a better overview of your software and be more efficient with respect to software development, you should think about raising the level of abstraction, e.g. by using domain specific modeling tools that let you focus on the structure of your model instead of having to deal with (basically irrelevant) syntactical details of the target language. If working at a higher level of abstraction makes things more complicated for you, you're doing something wrong.

Axel picked up this idea in his keynote on "Current Challenges for Industrial Software Development Tools and Languages" stating that any computer program can be conceived as a model. Since models are independent of their visual representation, they can be represented in various different forms, the most common being text, trees and diagrams of any kind. The question, however, whether to choose text or the abstract model as the primary artifact for storing. A textual representation clearly has advantages with respect to diffing and merging and can be handled with commonly used tools such as CVS nd plain text editors. Using the abstract model as the primary artifact allows for overlapping partial views. Since this model can persisted in some kind of repository, access to the model very much feels like working with a database. In particular, there's no need to parse any text back and forth between the model and an editor. The decision whether to store models as text or in a repository largely depends on boundary decisions, like the availability of the repository technology, the robustness of the mapping between the textual representation and the model, language characteristics, the number of developers who need to work on the model in parallel, the size of the software system built with the model and the life cycle of the software. Axel concluded that on one hand, modeling is not that much different from coding and that, on the other hand, DSLs are becoming increasingly important due to the complexity of UML.

One of the nice thing about conferences is you get to talk to people who are interested in the same topics as you are. MDSD Today has been no different - during the breaks you could see people involved in all kinds of discussions.

Later that day, Stefan Reichert and Birger Garbe of Lufthansa Systems shared their experiences regarding model driven software projects with us. The topic of their talk was "Model Driven Software Development in Business Projects: Chance or Risk?" Their anwser to this question was that if've got the right tools, MDSD is a chance and can help you to build better software.

Thomas Stahl of b+m concluded the day with his talk on how MDSD, BMP and SOA fit together:

The second and third day of the conference were crammed with hands-on tutorials on MDSD tools like EMF, Xtext, Xpand and GMF. Quite a lot of people attended the tutorials as you can see from the pictures.

Arno had to overcome the hardship of a broken beamer, so he had to use arms and legs to explain:

Overall, the conference was a real success and I am looking forward to seeing you all again at MDSD Today 2009!

On Where I'll Be Next Week...

2008-10-25T00:21:37Z

EclipseWorld 2008, of course! It's shaping up to be a great conference, and three of my colleagues and I have the distinct honor of being on the "expert faculty". We'll be delivering technical classes on a variety of topics important to application developers and database professionals. Our presentations will explore concepts such as software archeology, delve into architectural styles such as REST, and provide how-to guidance for database development, data modeling, and application factories in Java.

Scott Walz, senior director of product management, will deliver a class entitled "Classic Database Development Mistakes Made by Java Developers — and Five Ways to Overcome Them" on Wednesday at 3:15 pm. In this session, Scott will outline the five most common databas development mistakes made by Java developers and offer specific direction on how to overcome them.

Ravi Kumar, principal architect, will deliver a class entitled "How to Implement Application Factories in Java" on Thursday at 8:45 am. In this session, Ravi will utilize real-world examples to demonstrate how to build an end-to-end Web application with core capabilities, from database table all the way to presentation.

Michael Rozlog, JBuilder evangelist and co-author of “Mastering JBuilder", will deliver a class entitled "I’ve Just Inherited 1,000,000 Lines of Java Code — NOW WHAT?" on Thursday at 10:30 am. In this session, Michael will help developers understand the concepts behind software archeology and the tools used to support it, as well as explain how to apply the techniques of static and dynamic analysis in the real world. This session has been selected as one of the nine hottest classes at EclipseWorld.

I will be delivering a class entitled "Data Models for Java Applications" on Thursday at 8:45 am and another entitled "RESTful EMF" at 10:30 am. In the first session, I'll be reviewing the various types of data models and exploring how they are supported by projects at Eclipse. In the second session, I'll be providing an overview of Representational State Transfer (REST) and discussing how Java programs can be developed in accordance with the REST architecture style using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF).

In addition to the two technical classes on Thursday, I'll also be doing a Model Development Tools (MDT) project demo between 8:45 and 9:00 pm at the Eclipse Foundation party on Wednesday. I'll be giving a sneak preview of some of the technology soon to be contributed to Eclipse as part of the newly created Papyrus component and will also offer insights into more new subprojects on the horizon.

Where will you be next week? If your answer is the same as mine, I hope to see you there!