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March 24, 2010
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OSGi DevCon 2010: OSGi Best and Worst Practices

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Yesterday, Martin Lippert, Jeff McAffer and Paul Vanderlei gave a talk on OSGi Best and Worst Practices.

I really enjoyed the talk because between the four of us, we have a unique and pragmatic perspective on OSGi. I come mostly from a tooling OSGi background but have dabbled in runtime. Martin has been working with enterprise clients deploying OSGi technology for a long time. Paul focuses on embedding OSGi in crazy places. Jeff is just wise OSGi sage, helped Eclipse move to OSGi and has just been doing this forever.

We decided to go the presentation zen approach and it seemed to be received well by the audience. We were a little hesitant at first because deeply technical audiences don’t seem to take the zen style well from my experience, but looks like people enjoyed it. I guess anytime you characterize Peter Kriens as tinkerbell sprinkling OSGi dust everywhere people get a kick out of it.

On top of that, we had a good debate on Require-Bundle versus Import-Package.

I think the devil in the picture above looks more productive, right :)?

In the end, I hope you benefited from our experiences and learned something along the way.

March 24, 2010
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Eclipse Mentors and Google Summer of Code

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FYI, the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program is getting under way and Eclipse.org is participating.

So what’s next?

If you’re an Eclipse committer and interested in mentoring, here’s what you need to do.

  1. Make sure you have an idea listed on the ideas wiki page
  2. Be sure to sign up on the soc-dev mailing list so you can ask any questions
  3. Sign up as a mentor at Google so you get entered in the system

After we have all the mentors sign up, students will begin their submissions and we will go through the review process.

I’m looking forward to another successful year working with students via the GSOC program.

March 24, 2010
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Singlesourcing and Crowdsourcing Documentation

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One of the most common complaints I hear about open source projects is around documentation, from the complete lack of documentation to just outdated documentation. There’s many reasons why this is the case, from time to skills but I’m not going to go into that. Yesterday at EclipseCon, David Green and I gave a talk about Crowdsourcing and Singlesourcing Documentation at Eclipse and our thoughts on how to solve the documentation problem for Eclipse.org related projects.

While the talk is focused on Eclipse.org related projects, there is nothing in there that prevents you from taking what we did and apply it to your own projects, whether or not they are open source. The key lessons here is that most developers don’t like contributing to documentation to begin with. They also never have the time. On top of that, if the barriers to contributing documentation is high, no one will contribute and you’ll end up with low quality documentation.

Lower those barriers by enabling a variety of people to contribute documentation, not only people with commit access to the project. If you involve and enable the community to contribute, you may be surprised at what contributions you get.

What other experiences have people faced when it comes to open source related documentation? What can make things better?

March 23, 2010
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Google Visit and Hello Nexus One

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I had the opportunity to briefly visit the Google Open Source Programs Office yesterday with a friend that works there (thanks Shawn). Out of the many things Google does, I truly respect what the Open Source Programs Office does, especially with the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program. I’ve been mentoring students for the past five years and the experience has always been positive. When I was a student back in the day, I recall working with the Gentoo Linux open source community and how much that shaped me as a developer. It was empowering to work in an open source community and made me realize that’s how software should be developed. I can only be thankful for the experience and pay it forward. I think Google giving students the ability to work with open source communities during the summer and getting paid for it is going to bear some really good fruit in the future of the software.

While I was on the Google campus, I said hello to some sculptures.

The picture above was taken with an iPhone. I guess that upset Google so I scored a Nexus One.

As a long time iPhone user, I will give the Nexus One and Android a shot for a month.

On top of that, I managed to score some more swag…

Although I’m not sure what they are trying to tell me with this particular swag. Thanks Google 🙂

March 22, 2010
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The Start of an Adventure – EGit/JGit 0.7.1

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The EGit/JGit teams are happy to announce the EGit and JGit 0.7.1 release.

You can install it by pointing to this software repository in Eclipse:

This marks the first official release of EGit and JGit at Eclipse.org and a big step towards Git at Eclipse. This release was mostly focused on the move to Eclipse.org and infrastructure related items. It’s important to note that this release is still an incubation release. I don’t want to be cliche, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It’s especially hard that people have been spoiled by the quality of the CVS tooling at Eclipse. On the whole, we are rapidly working on improving JGit and the tooling but require community feedback to make it happen. The workflows aren’t perfect yet but the tooling works well in many cases.

So now that you understand a bit, how can you help?

The goal is to have 0.8.0 go out just before the Eclipse Helios release (June 2010). We plan on adding a Git Repositories view, further expanding http support and cleaning up the user interface. With the help from the community, I expect great things by the Helios release. On top of that, we expect to have one or two Google Summer of Code (GSOC) students working on improvements.

For now, put your beta testing hats on and explore what EGit and JGit has to offer.

We thrive on community feedback and involvement.

March 21, 2010
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OSGi DevCon 2010 – Working with OSGi

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Tomorrow as part of OSGi DevCon 2010… Simon Archer, Jeff McAffer, Paul Vanderlei and I will be giving an awesome OSGi tutorial. The tutorial will take you through developing a fully functional OSGi-based application based on the famous Toast example from the OSGi and Equinox book.

We’ll cover the key elements of OSGi and creating OSGi-based systems with principles and practices that are applicable in a wide range of application domains and execution scenarios. A lot of time and effort went into the book and Toast example. In my opinion, the Toast example is the best OSGi example out there and you’ll benefit from learning it.

Why should you come to our OSGi tutorial? Well, you’ll have the eyes and ears of four guys who have been doing OSGi for many years. On top of that, you’ll get to hear us make some controversial statements like when programming OSGi, don’t use OSGi. Oh, and you’ll hear Jeff talk about how modularity is the lubrication of collaboration.

March 18, 2010
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Activate Chuck on build.eclipse.org

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Choice is important when it comes to open source and we try to provide it at Eclipse. To promote choice, your lovely build.eclipse.org maintainers have kindly installed the Chuck Norris plug-in.

So now you have a choice between the Hudson butler and an ass-kicking Chuck Norris on your build page.

Chuck can be activated on a per-hudson project basis. It’s off by default.

Enjoy. Activating Chuck is so much better than working on EclipseCon presentations 🙂

March 18, 2010
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EclipseCon 2010 Tweetup

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There will be a Eclipse community tweetup at EclipseCon.

The Eclipse community has a fine tradition of taking over the Hyatt bar on the night before EclipseCon. Let’s continue that tradition.

Please sign up if you can come!

March 18, 2010
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Fedoras and Change

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I’m pleased to announce I have decided to join Red Hat.

Gandhi said you must be the change you wish to see in the world. I was given a unique opportunity to change things and am looking forward to it. Look for me to strengthen the state of Eclipse on Linux and improve the state of Git tooling at Eclipse. On top of that, I get the opportunity to spread the Eclipse and OSGi love to the JBoss folks.

I look forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon and enjoying some frosty beverages.

March 17, 2010
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Equinox OSGi Book Finally Here

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When I came home last night, I was delighted to find a package (because I’m a fan of gifts).

What was in the package? A brand spanking new copy of the Equinox OSGi book.

In my biased opinion, this is best OSGi book on the market. I’ve had the honor to see the book evolve while it was written. Through that experience, the OSGi tooling at Eclipse (PDE) improved significantly. The authors were kind enough to nag inform me when things didn’t work the way they desired and I did my best to fix everything.

Why is this the best OSGi book on the market? First off, the authors know their stuff and have been working with OSGi before it was cool. Second, the book comes with one of the best example OSGi applications I’ve seen. Third, kind words are said about me in the Acknowledgments section 🙂

The only downside, my last name was spelled wrong in the Acknowledgments section (will be fixed in second printing).

So what are you waiting for, grab the book and play with the Toast example.

If you want hands on training from the authors of the book and me, please attend our tutorial at EclipseCon! It’s not too late to register!

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