Twitter github

Posts Tagged with “e4”

e4 @ Poznan JUG

Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak at the Poznan JUG.

I cobbled up a presentation and demo about Eclipse e4 with the help of Boris Bokowski and Lars Vogel…

There was a lot of interest in e4 and people said they learned something new so I’m pleased. I also had the opportunity to meet Geertjan Wielenga from the Netbeans side of the world. He gave an interesting presentation on the status of the Netbeans platform and where they are headed. Good to see that Netbeans finally cares about OSGi… we had our own module system back in the day at Eclipse and realized that it’s better to just adopt a standard than hold onto your own. Anyways, kudos to the Netbeans team exposing OSGi to their user base. Ed Burns gave an interesting talk about the history of user interfaces and ways to classify them via an ontology, fascinating stuff.

On the whole, a special thanks to Adam Dudczak and the rest of the Poznan JUG team for the invite.

Speaking at Poznan JUG

I’m excited to be heading back to the motherland next week.

My main focus will be GeeCon, however, I got invited to present at the local Poznan JUG with some other folks. I was initially going to talk about API evolution and management but I got roped in to talk about e4. While I’m no Boris Bokowski when it comes to e4, I’m sure I can educate and entertain people for around 30 minutes on where the the Eclipse platform is headed. So if you’re in the area and want to learn a bit more about e4, please consider attending!

I’m also thrilled to meet Dariusz Luksza in person who is currently being mentored by Matthias Sohn (SAP) and the EGit team for Google Summer of Code 2010 at Eclipse. He’s doing some great work around adding tagging support to EGit and will be focusing on the synchronize view soon along with the rest of the EGit team.

Anyways, see you in Poland next week!

e4 Summit from the eyes of a committer

The e4 summit happened in Ottawa recently. The summit was great in so many ways, it goes to show you the amount of passion certain people have for moving Eclipse forward. A lot of credit goes to the Platform team for really putting stuff together and opening things up. A personal highlight of the summit for me was having great people like McQ bare his soul on the future longevity of Eclipse.

There has been some recent chatter about what went on at the e4 summit, but I think it’s hard for someone to really say something if they weren’t there. Sure, the wiki has some information but it doesn’t tell the complete story. I think the main thing that was accomplished was opening things up and getting the community excited about the future of the Eclipse platform. The mission statement that most people agreed with at the summit was that e4 was, “the next generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools.”

As for my personal takeaways:

  • It was cool to see Adobe there and their interest in the SWT Mac Cocoa port
  • The ability to style Eclipse is important to everyone… let’s bring sexy back
  • Macro recording will become a reality, look for prototypes soon in e4
  • EMF isn’t so bad 🙂
  • Multi-lingual plug-ins need to happen… possible PDE/JSDT integration
  • A lot of people care about flexible resources… look for it to become real
  • The OSGi component model is cool… it needs to be brought to other domains
  • I learned a lot from Steve Northover… especially about the Hydra

A lot more things happened, but that’s what currently sticks in my mind. On the whole, expect to see some good things happening out of e4… and remember… there should be nothing stopping you from getting involved… the door is open…

Want to get involved?

Sign up on the mailing list and state your interest! It’s that easy.

e4 Thoughts

So the cat is out of the bag today, people are finally talking about an Eclipse 4.0 again. Some people are worried that Eclipse 4.0 won’t be as transparent or diverse as it needs to be, but I think that point is somewhat moot. In the end, people will either put up some commitment if they really care or shut-up. Let me rant a bit though.

For those who don’t know, a discussion actually happened last year at EclipseCon 2007 but didn’t really go anywhere… all I remember is Kevin McGuire talking about Mac OS UI and shiny objects. My personal feelings why things didn’t go anywhere was because there was no prototyped code kicking around… I mean… most of us are engineers… we like toying with code… we don’t like to talk about Mac OS UI and shiny objects (sorry Kevin!) most of the time. This time around, there’s some prototyped code kicking around. We can gather around the code and share our thoughts… it’s not like IBM and other participant’s of e4 are dumping code and saying this will be Eclipse 4.0… I simply view this more as an opportunity for people who are willing to step up and participate in the future of Eclipse.

Now that my rant is over with… what are one of my thoughts of what should be in an Eclipse 4.0? I’d give my first-born for something like a Firebug in Eclipse. If you ever worked with HTML, CSS or web development in general… Firebug makes this painful style of development a bit more enjoyable 🙂 I tried implementing part of my dream with Plug-in Spy in the 3.4 version of Eclipse, but that’s just a small piece of the puzzle. There are many limitations in the current platform that make it hard to introspect and edit things. So my contribution to the e4 enigma will be making sure that this style of introspection will be possible in the new platform. Hopefully I’ll become a committer. I’ll leave e4 tooling out of the discussion for now, but I plan to have an impact there too when the time comes.

So there you go. In the end, it will all be about teamwork and the willingness to work in an open-source environment:

So let’s start contributing once some code is available and newsgroups/mailing lists are established 🙂