Hey guys, we will be having an Eclipse DemoCamp in Austin on June 2nd, 2010! The gracious guys at Texas Coworking are letting us use their space which is conveniently located downtown.
I’m still in the process of establishing a program, choosing the beer and gathering speakers so please be patient. In the mean time, please sign up on the wiki if you want to attend or speak 🙂
I thought I’d never see the day but as Jeff McAffer mentioned earlier today, the latest edition of the RCP book is done and headed to the presses. Sorry for the delay, it should be on the shelves in the next couple weeks.
The book covers the Eclipse Galileo release (3.5.2 in particular). A lot has changed since the Eclipse 3.1 release so we did our best to cover new topics such as p2 and Databinding. An important focus of the book was to update the code and make sure we did a good job covering p2 as that was one of the major changes to RCP over the years. In the end, we hope everyone appreciates the update, it’s hard to please everyone but I think the community will benefit on the whole from some fresh content. One of the challenges in open source projects is quality documentation and books definitely help.
On a side note, it took us awhile to choose a cover image.
What do you think the cover symbolizes :)?
One of my favorite Java related conferences is coming up in less than a month, JAX 2010! This year, I have the honor of moderating Eclipse Platform Day (note, some of the content is in German).
There will be 7 talks total, here’s a sampling of some of the talks:
I find the JAX conference in Mainz really well organized and highly recommend anyone that’s not too far away to consider attending. If you have any doubts, check the program schedule to see if it aligns with any of your interests.
On the whole, I look forward jogging along the Rhine and seeing new and old faces in beautiful Mainz.
There’s been some discussion as of late amongst the Eclipse Architecture Council about streamlining the committer election process.
I brought the issue up because I have mentored quite a few projects at Eclipse.org and have seen the good and bad parts of the process in play. We are also at a time where we are modifying the Eclipse Development Process so we have the opportunity to make some changes to the committer election process. I don’t like the process currently because I think it takes too long for a committer to get elected and eventually get commit rights to source control. From the 7 day election period to the paperwork, I think we can do a bit better. I like the process because it plays into the fact that Eclipse is a meritocracy and allows existing committers and community members to speak their mind. In reality, there are very few times where I have seen someone voted down when an election was called. In most cases, I’ll bet existing committers have talked amongst themselves already before calling an election so that veto vote is less likely to happen.
How do other mature open source projects deal with this? How do we make it better?
Anyways, if you have any comments or suggestions, please speak up on the bug. It would be nice to hear from people what they experienced when they were being on-boarded as an Eclipse committer or even other open source projects.
In Eclipse 3.6 M7, PDE will offer a new wizard that allows you to take the contents of your currently active target platform and dump it on disk somewhere.
We used this utility while writing the OSGi/Equinox and RCP books and I finally got around to pushing it into PDE (it was hiding in the PDE incubator for awhile). Thanks to Ian Bull for using one of the tried and true methods of getting people to do stuff in open source: patches and nagging 🙂
Shawn Pearce (Google) and I will be giving a webinar on Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse in mid July. We’ll try our best to brainwash you.
By that time, more projects will have moved to Git at Eclipse (and even elsewhere) and EGit/JGit 0.8.0 will be out so we will have more goodies to share with everyone.
So what are you waiting for, register in advance.
If you want to us to discuss anything special, please let me know via the comments.
The Eclipse Planning Council recently setup a poll to solicit feedback from the Eclipse community on deciding a name for the next Eclipse Simultaneous release. In my opinion, “I” is a hard letter to use as the basis for a name but I think we have come up with a good list of names to choose from.
I’m personally split between Indigo and Izar. I like Indigo because of the name… and I like Izar because we can totally rock some PageRank with that. On top of that, Izar is neat because it’s a double star system (it’s hard to see the smaller one)…
Anyways, put your vote in and let’s get a name.
In Eclipse 3.6, PDE API Tools is adding support for API migration reports.
What are API migration reports you may ask (besides being magical)?
Have you ever wondered if you took a bundle you developed during the Eclipse 3.5 stream and tried to run it on the Eclipse 3.6 stream without any changes if it still would work? I have at least and I know many others have. A migration report is generated from an existing API usage report combined with a newer release of the API being used. It detects all possible migration issues that could occur between the version from which the API usage report has generated and the current version. To demonstrate how this work, I recently teamed up with Olivier Thomann to come up with a demonstration. First, we took a usage scan of a large Eclipse Galileo install and then used that to feed into a migration report that targeted the latest milestone of the Eclipse 3.6 stream…
What do we see? There were a few problems but I decided to focus in on the org.eclipse.debug.ui bundle. We notice that there are a few problems with the BreakpointView reference… in particular a couple bundles accessing some internal code. If we dive deeper…
Oh, we see that two naughty bundles from Mylyn and DLTK accessing the internal BreakpointView.getCheckboxViewer() method which doesn’t exist in the Eclipse 3.6 stream anymore. As a bundle developer, you should be aware of this contract and understand the inherent risk you take when you access internal code. As long as you understand the risk, you should be a bit more understanding when you hit issues like this. On top of that, tools like this should make it a bit easier to deal with when you migrate to new releases of your software.
Anyways, the PDE team hopes you find this tool useful.
I was just notified by a friend that an Eclipse-based Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) application won the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Impact Award!
The application that one was featured in Austin Riddle’s EclipseCon 2010 presentation, entitled Eclipse to the Rescue. The application provides immediate access to crucial, real-time information concerning biological events around the world. It’s always nice to see Eclipse-based applications having a positive impact at a government level and winning awards while doing it.
Anyways, congratulations guys!
Here’s a tip for you if you love internationalization and hate waste. You can easy find broken externalized strings using the Source->Find Broken Externalized Strings command…
After you do that, you get a list of broken strings that you can prune to trim the size of your NLS-related classes.
Less waste is good.
