IMO this is one of the best ways to allow the community to participate and make its voice heard. Topics such as committer tools (Git, Bugzilla & co) and improvements to the IP process (such as parallel IP, incubation) are discussed at the board resulting into plans/directions for the Eclipse Foundation to implement.

My vision and my goals for 2013 are available online on my candidate page. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate and send them to me.

Two days ago webmaster sent out an email to all committers with voting credentials.

Please don’t miss this chance to make your voice heard and vote now. I would be pleased to receive yours.

Thanks!

Polyglot Persistence: EclipseLink JPA for NoSQL, Relational, and Beyond
(Tuesday, Oct 2, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM – Parc 55 – Cyril Magnin I) 

Yes, there will be a demo running EclipseLink on Gyrex OSGi connecting to MongoDB.

I’m currently in Frankfurt  waiting at the gate. I’ll arrive Friday night in San Francisco and will stay till next Friday (Oct. 5th). If you are around, interested in a chat (about runtimes, OSGi, other stuff that matters) and/or want to grab a beer please ping me!

It’s no secret that IBM’s investment into the core platform is declining. From looking at the stats today, they still have 80+ active Eclipse committers. However, only three (according to this mail) are working on the core platform (Platform UI that is).

Another issue is attitude. There are a lot companies out there using and building on the core platform. However, most just take the investment by IBM for granted. A lot also simply underestimated the effect of a new major release. Eclipse 4 is a complete rewrite in terms of Platform UI. Of course it’s not as stable as 3.x yet. However, I heard statements like “oh it (any Eclipse release) always worked for us“. So some just didn’t care a lot about testing on 4.x. That valuable testing feedback is painfully missed these days.

Frankly, I’m curious myself how this will turn out because developer tools are still necessary. I just can’t believe that no one of the large companies with hundreds and thousands of developers realizes that. I actually thought about making a business out of that, i.e. getting paid for working on the core of Eclipse by selling maintenance/support contracts/features. However, I also think that this will be a challenging business to develop. It’s hard to convince companies of certain sizes to spend money on something they either get for free or invest money into someone that is too small for their business.

BTW, I know of at least a few companies in the Eclipse ecosystem that tried. But they never became a significant contributor to the core platform. Not sure if it was a matter of lack of business or lack of focus. They are making money with Eclipse, though. Their business is also based on the core platform. Wondering what they will do.

It’s also hard to convince members who are already paying membership fees to spend additional money for developing Eclipse.  Paying twice sounds unfair. So another intriguing option is to change the Foundation by-laws so that it will be allowed to hire rock star core platform developers. Maybe they just need to hire a complement to Linus for Eclipse. Well that would be me or course.

I also do have an issue with people complaining very loudly about something. It’s not that there weren’t any previous chances to chime in and speak up when previous decisions were made. But those complaining the loudest do not necessarily represent a majority. Note, I’m not denying any of the Eclipse 4 problems here. Just saying something I observed during my excursions in politics.  It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

Luckily, Google not only noticed that discussion but carefully paid attention for an immediate need. Their Open Source office donated $20.000 to buy new performance testing hardware. Thank you Google! 

BTW, Eclipse 4.2 runs fine on my new notebook. I did not observe the performance issues so far. However, I remember I had issues with the new animations on my old notebook. I showed them to Eric at ECE 2011 . But that was on a development build and turning off animations solved my performance issues back then.

I really wonder how this will turn out. I recently learned that SAP is the 3rd largest contributor to Eclipse these days. I hope they will start investing into the core platform. The guys in the SAP Open Source office (although not officially named as such) are smart. But it would mean for IBM to give up control and let others play an important role in the strategic future of the core platform.

Please give us your feedback in bug 378285.

We quickly setup an Eclipse stand over there and Mike, Andrew and myself are showing demos and talking to people. BTW, thanks to the FOSDEM organizer to have it well prepared so that we just needed to setup our banner and our notebooks for the demos.

So far we have a great mixture of questions from developers using Eclipse for their day-to-day work, programming questions of Eclipse plug-in developers and people interested in Orion. There are also people stepping by that have no questions – they introduce themselves as happy Eclipse users and appreciate what the committers of the various projects have built over time. Thanks for those kind words folks!

I also use them to drive PDE Build. Instead of specifying stuff to fetch for a build again I simply point PDE Build to the same .target file I use in the IDE. Works like a charm as long as you only use “Software Sites” (p2 repositories) which are accessible via URL by any developers Eclipse instance as well as the build machine.

Previously, this was implemented by transforming the .target file XML using XSL into an Ant script. The Ant script did a bunch of p2 mirror calls to download the bytes. I recently upgrade to a newer version of the builder containing a Juno version of the org.eclipse.pde.core bundle. Starting with 3.8 this bundle defines a nice Ant task that does not require the XSLT magic.

<target name="buildTargetPlatform" unless="skipTargetDefinition">
  <!-- note: this requires pde.core (from Juno) in the base builder -->
  <pde.provisionTargetDefinition
      targetFile="/path/to/my.target"
      destinationDirectory="${repoBaseLocation}/target"
      clearDestination="false"/>
</target>

FOSDEM (Feb. 4 – 5, Brussels, Belgium)

I’ve never been in Brussels before. I’ve also never been at FOSDEM before. Andrew told me about his plan to generate some nice Eclipse buzz there. Well, it looks like that will turn out great. Mike will be there too. We’ll have an Eclipse stand for people to show some projects and talks about Eclipse and we’ll also give a few talks about Eclipse. Mine will be about EclipseRT.

EclipseCon (March 26 – 29, Reston, Virginia, USA)

Ok, this one is a classic (for me). I’ve been there before. You gotta have to be there! However, this year my flight to EclipseCon will be shorter. The event moved from the west coast to the east coast. Frankly, I always wondered about switching location away from Santa Clara. But I’ll also miss San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city always worth a visit. Yet it took me three EclipseCons until I finally visited it in 2009 for the first time. I may need to find a new event in that area.  Anyway, I’ll give one of the many tutorials there (Dynamic Server Applications with EclipseRT).

JAX (April 16-20, Mainz, Germany)

Also bit of a classic, I like that event. It’s packed with lots of sessions and people. I’ll talk about developing cloud applications with Eclipse Gyrex. Our first major version (1.0) is only weeks away and that talk will be a great opportunity to learn more about Gyrex and see how we use it to solve some interesting problems.

Hope to see you soon at any of the events!

In case you are interested, I’ll give to talks this week. The first one is today in the afternoon and the second one tomorrow.

• Managing large and distributed Eclipse Server Applications
  Wednesday, 17:00, Willhelm-Krämer-Zimmer

• Developing Runtime Applications with Eclipse Gyrex
  Thursday, 15:30, Seminarräume 5

Eclipse Demo Camp Jena
June 22nd, 5pm
JenTower, floor 27, room Hamburg

Yes, on the day of Indigo GA!

Interested? Register today and we’ll see us next Wednesday. I think there is still room for one or two interesting demos. Thus, if you are developing some cool Eclipse technology or product that you’d like to showcase just add it to the list on the registration page.

See you there!

Once again we are organizing an Eclipse Demo Camp in Jena.

Jena, June 22nd, 2011

If you’d like to attend or present please don’t hesitate to contact me or add yourself to the wiki page!

Our three hours tutorial will introduce you to the key concepts for developing web applications with the OSGi HttpService, the Equinox ServletBridge and Virgo. Virgo is new this year and we are happy to have Glynn and Christopher joining us and talking a bit about Virgo.

We’ll also have a great set of exercises. Thus, please bring your laptops with you and make sure its battery is loaded. All you need is a vanilla Eclipse SDK 3.7 M6 and a JDK on your system. But don’t worry we’ll also have a way to distribute the necessary pieces on site.

Monday, March 21st, 9am
EclipseCon 2011, Ballroom A

See you there!

If you are a committer you are able to vote! If you haven’t received a mail with your voting password yet please have a look at this mail which was sent to the committer mailing list. It explains how to register as a full member with a few steps. Basically you need to sign the membership agreement and fax it to the Foundation’s office. There is still time! Voting ends on March 11, 2011 at 3pm Eastern time.

I think the most interesting challenges for the upcoming term are Git and Gerrit. There is still a significant amount of code in CVS and quite a few projects are planning to switch after the Indigo release. Now Gerrit is interesting. There’s a really good description and a screencast written/created by Alex available. Very good read and watch. It really has some benefits and potential for an important role in managing source contributions to Eclipse projects. I think it’s clear that with Git the current way of handling patches through Eclipse Bugzilla doesn’t scale. So we have to find a good story for integrating Gerrit into the Eclipse IP process. But frankly, I don’t see IPzilla go away anytime soon. There is still the whole management of 3rd party dependencies which is well implemented there. Of course, there is always room for improvement (even outside of IPzilla).

On the other hand, Gerrit is a new tool that needs to be dealt with by the Eclipse webmasters. Once it is an essential part of the Eclipse development infrastructure it needs to be governed with SLAs (which basically translates to manpower). Thus, this effort must be supported by the Board which I hope to drive forward when I’m elected as one of your representatives.

There is also a way to launch them. However, what always bothered me was that this was just a fake application launch. You had to use the product editor all the time to keep the launch configs in sync. But over time I noticed some issues. Sometimes, when updating target platforms, something gets out of sync, features will be missing, whatever. Your launch is broken and the guys start to line up next to my desk.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice to just launch products all the time and have them 100% like they should be all the time including automatic validation of missing features (even included once) and plug-ins?

Oh yes! If you need this, just install my Patches for PDE (via Help -> Install New Software…). I published a new version in my repository (http://eclipseguru.org/). The relevant patch is attached to bug 326059.

Julius Wagenknecht
2010-09-04 03:40 UTC
49cm, 3090g

At 5:40am local time my wife gave birth two our second child. It’s one of those few things that are way better than Open Source. They are both healthy. We spent most of the day together and began enjoying our new life as “party of four”.

Picture below.

As with all my Open Source engagements, I just don’t stop after reporting them. I also take the time to analyze them and provide patches for them. Why? Well, it saves me a lot of time in the end because I don’t need to live with workarounds.

Here is a list of patches produced so far for Eclipse PDE 3.6:

• Bug 314619 - [patch] org.eclipse.equinox.app is not started when using Eclipse Application launcher
• Bug 315039 - [patch] Eclipse launch configuration should inherit properties from target platform
• Bug 315061 - [patch] Should read start levels from bundles.info of target platform when launching Eclipse application
• Bug 320763 - [patch] SelfHostingProfile needs environment properties

Now, thanks to Eclipse it’s also possible to easily share the patches with you. Just point your Eclipse 3.6 installation to my p2 repository (http://eclipseguru.org/) and install “EclipseGuru’s Patches for PDE“.