Look:

Nachträgliche manuelle Umbuchungen sind technisch völlig ausgeschlossen, da ein zentrales Rechenzentrum mit Warenwirtschaftssystemanbindung sämtliche Buchungsvorgänge vollautomatisch steuert.

Or in English:

Manual modifications afterwards are technically absolutely impossible, because we have a central data center with ERP system integration which controls every booking totally automated.

Alternative translation:

We don’t have control over our software. Sorry folks, you lost.

I get this sentence whenever I want to make a change to an already place order. For example, an item is on backorder and it just takes too long but there is a similar one available on stock. Actually I would expect the system to detect this before I place an order but that’s another story.

#onlineshop #eibmarkt #fail

I’m wondering now if modeling solved the problem of cloning. Anyway, I just registered today to be there and watch that happening.

But it’s that darn simple!

1. Checkout the library from source. You can use a well known tag/branch for this.
2. Get in touch with the maintainers and implement your modifications.
3. Build and release your modified version until a new official release is available.

I do not agree with all the ideas. Well, I don’t have to. Especially I don’t like to see the Eclipse Foundation hiring Eclipse developers. But I have another idea. It’s not that of a big deal, i.e. we could tackle it today with the process we have in place. But it’s not a low hanging fruit either.

Think along the lines of the Runtime project. It’s a great project with a diverse committer community. I think we should archive the Eclipse project. Equinox already moved out. The desktop bits could move to the RT project as well. RAP is already there so SWT, JFace and parts of the workbench would be a good fit too. The IDE stuff, JDT, Help and Resources bits could move to the Tool project. e4 clearly is a Technology project. Why didn’t it start as such in the beginning? Is it all driven by the fear of one contributor?

I think you get the point. It’s not so important what we move where. I think it’s more important that we refactor the Eclipse project. It’s too large, too complex and too difficult for adopters to understand it and to get involved. We should listen to ourselves. It’s written in the Equinox whitepaper. I’d like to see more smaller components, which are developed and evolved independent from each other. That’s easier to handle and to develop than one large code base.

Update, March 21, 5:30pm local time … I’m there.

There is one point in the blog the I don’t like at all. It’s yet again I hear the myth about automatically generating OSGi bundles from 3rd party libraries and how successful it is used in the SpringSource bundle repository. Folks, it might work for one 3rd party library but it will never work  in an automated way for all 3rd party libraries. There are just too many issues around OSGi-fying 3rd party libs which need to be addressed carefully. If the library deals with class loading you might be out of luck no matter how great your generated manifests look like. You need to modify your source code and/or patch the 3rd party library to make it work correctly. Even better, sometimes there are multiple ways to convert a 3rd party library into an OSGi bundle. A stubborn one-to-one conversion process cannot incorporate that. It may depend on your requirements and preferences.

The process is not finished with generating manifests. Be aware that this can cause broken bundles. Those issues are fixable. But this example shows that every library requires careful attention.

A few Ctrl+R unveiled some interesting facts.

• The PDE Require Bundle section should move to the right side.
• Orbit needs some love!
• Write bug reports!
• Modeling in e4 is controversial. (Now that’s a surprise!)
• The modeling guys hate XML.
• A lady bug screen saver looks nice.
• SWT is on diet and will not get any cake.

Anyway, the agenda that Jeff, Martin and Heiko came up with is great. Based on some questions they asked before the symposium they defined topics and also attached time slots to it. At the end, there will be a fishbowl. I don’t know what that is but Jeff’s description sounded interesting.

The crowd is mixed. There are people from many different countries and companies and I heard one guy saying Microsoft. It’s also great to see a lot new faces which actually means that the topic is really attracting new people.

All systems are go! See you in Ludwigsburg next week. I’ll be there from Monday till Friday.

What about you?

I just had that upps effect with RSSOwl. All my blogs were gone after removing the old profile dir which I haven’t used for months (I moved out of a Windows domain severel weeks ago).