I have been using Mylyn heavily for about a year now. I hadn't realized how much it has embedded itself into my work habits. It was just how I did my job and I never paid attention to how much I was using it. Then my laptop crapped out. The machine was fine but the screen was dead and so it had to go to the repair shop. That turned into a month long ordeal. The catch was that it was supposed to take about a week so I didn't bother to set Mylyn back up on the interim machine, thinking it would just take too long to rebuild all of my queries (I have a lot because I work on so many internal and external projects). After the saga of laptop repair (non-repair really) had passed its second week I started to really feel the pain of Mylyn withdrawal. I was jonesing. What was going on with all those open bugs?! I was reduced to reading emails to see what had been updated, I couldn't easily follow whole threads... The horror.

My laptop is back now. I was able to catch up on all the stuff I missed. Nice little arrows and triangles showing me what had changed since I last reviewed my bugs. Notifications popping up in the lower corner of my screen when a change occurs. Ah.

The bugs interface would be great if that's all there were to the tool. But with the change sets management, file hiding, etc, I don't think I can live without it any more. It's the first thing I install on any

Thanks Mylyn team!

I am back from the Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 in Ludwigsburg and found the time to put the slides from the talk on Equinox Aspects online (pdf). The slides are pretty much the same as from the previous talks I gave on aspect weaving for OSGi during the past weeks, so you won't find real new stuff in it. Nevertheless, giving this talk is just plain fun.

The RT symposium (I helped Heiko and Jeff a bit to organize it) on Tuesday morning was more or less an open discussion about topics around the RT project. We asked for answers to some questions upfront to the meeting and discussed those during the first part of the symposium. For sure some nice and interesting discussions came up during this. Nevertheless the second part of the symposium was a lot more lively and interesting from my point of view. We collected some topics, prioritized them and discussed them in the prioritized order (maybe something like "Open-Space Light"). There was a lot more discussion going on, more participation, sometimes even a bit controversal. Great. If I will participate in organizing such a symposium again sometime in the future, I will definitely vote for doing more (if not all) of the symposium that way.
A rough outline of the symposium can be found at the RT-Symposium-at-ESE-2008 wiki page. And I can recommand watching the video podcast that Ian Skerrett recorded together with Jeff about the RT symposium. Its fun watching... :-)

This was not the only video that Ian recorded at the event. He interviewed all the symposium organizers and published these great video podcast episodes (series 1, series 2). Thanks a lot, Ian, for these video podcasts. Absolutely great!!!

For those that missed my talk at Eclipse Summit Europe, here are my slides. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all the documentation we have on this capability, as I mention in the next steps slide. The community needs to step up and help with this if we want this capability to grow.

Well, thanks to the eclipse debug team for pointing me in the correct direction, the XSL Tools Debugger now correctly identifies the various items within a XSL Nodeset or Result Fragment.



This is committed and will be in the 1.0M4 build. Being able to view the contents of nodesets will be a big help in debugging stylesheets. Other nice to have features:

• Break Points in XML Input files - currently XSL Tools doesn't support this.
• XPath Watch Expressions - again currently not supported.

Are there any other items users or adopters would like to see from a debugging stand point?

I proposed a long talk for EclipseCon 2009 about Glimmer.

Topic: Simplifying Desktop Development with Glimmer

Description:

Programming SWT/JFace user-interfaces in Java often involves a lot of repetitive boiler-plate code that is overly verbose and hard to map to the user-interface visually. This can significantly hinder maintainability and productivity for Eclipse RCP projects.

Enter Glimmer; a new JRuby API for SWT that takes advantage of the highly productive Ruby language to provide a very simple user-interface DSL (domain-specific language.) It can help Java developers build the presentation layer faster and with more maintainable code. Also, it can help Ruby developers build a complete SWT application in Ruby.

Glimmer comes with built-in data-binding support to greatly facilitate writing maintainable and testable desktop application code.

In this presentation, I will introduce Glimmer, provide a quick tutorial for its syntax and paradigms, demonstrate a few Glimmer applications, and explain how to test-drive a Glimmer application by following the Model-View-Presenter pattern.

I’m very happy to announce that we now have a new committer on Swordfish! Volodymyr Zhabiuk has been successfully elected last week and now has full write access to the Swordfish SVN.

Volodymyr was deeply involved in a many architectural discussions in the past and has had quite some impact on the current design.

Welcome, Volodymyr!

We’re back from two exciting days at Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg. As always, it was great to meet so many people you rarely see and get to talk to in person.
The quality of the talks was good overall, but somewhat inferior to last year’s ESE in my opinion. These are my comments on the talks that I had a chance to attend:

• Keynote by Dave Thomas: Great content from an industry veteran, very relaxed, very provocative, but really inspiring!
• Implementing Screen Flows in Eclipse RCP Applications: Clean and easy solution to a problem often encountered when you try to use RCP for non-workbench style applications like banking, insurance etc. Would be great if it could be included into SWT.
• Deploying Eclipse Modelling On an Industrial Scale with Software Factories: Boring and, sorry, I just didn’t get the point.
• Next Generation Textual DSLs with Xtext: Great concept, well done and an excellent presentation.
• Aspect Weaving for OSGi: Not really new to me, but I’m always amazed by the possibilities this opens up. Good presentation.
• Higgins Identity Framework: Did you really expect to cram 48 slides into 25 minutes? I left after 40 minutes because lunch was getting cold.
• What’s New in Plugin Development: Great new features and, as always, very professionally presented by Chris.
• Best Practices for Equinox and OSGi: Great example application, much different and definitely more fun than the standard RCP blabla. Really looking forward to read the book!
• Eclipse on Rails: RCP at the Swiss Railway: I never thought that you could really do this type of thing with RCP. Very interesting application domain and presented with great style in the tradition of Swiss graphics design (think Helvetica))
• RT Project Demo: Too short to be really useful IMHO.
• EclipseLink: High-Performance Java Persistence: Good presentation and a great piece of software.
• Equinox p2: Provisioning your world: A bit weak on the demo side, so not everything was completely clear to me. p2 is definitely something to keep an eye on.

My own presentation “Eclipse Swordfish – an Open Source SOA Runtime Framework for the Enterprise” went smoothly with a reasonable number of auditors still there at that time of the day. Thank you very much for attending! The slides are up on the conference site.

I’m really looking forward to EclipseCon in Santa Clara next year!

Pop Quiz: How many connections exist between Node 1 and Node 2?



Since connections are drawn on top of one another, it is not always easy to tell. This is a problem that many people using Zest have faced. To assist with this, I have added a new API on GraphConnection. You can now call GraphConnection#setDepth to curve the connections.



GraphSnippet11 shows how this API can be used. I still have to add the functionality to the JFace viewer, but the functionality should be there by the time M4 comes out.

I'm back in reality and just recap what happened the last 4 days.

My talks

Let me first recap my talks. I think all in all they went quite well though there are always things to improve (it was my first time doing a talk my own)

E4 - Modeling the workbench

I think I never talked to so many people ever before because I did my presentation in the biggest room available.I think I got the message around what the E4 project is about and in particular what the subtask-team I'm in is doing. The first reviews tell me that I didn't fail but I look forward for more comments.After my talk many people showed up personally. From what I can tell they agree with us about heading in the right direction. I think I even got the message about the joy, passion and openess the current E4-team is working together around that good that people think about joining us and bring in their own vision about the future of the Eclipse Platform. Hope to see you soon showing up at the E4-Mailing list.

Datacentric RCP with EMF and Databinding

I did the presentation in the 2nd biggest room and there even haven't been enough chairs for all people who wanted to attend my talk so they had to stand in the back. Woohoo.

I felt more comfortable speaking without a microphone and I think I showed people when mixing the right Eclipse technologies it's possible to write Enterprise ready Database frontends.

I admit my presentation was a bit focused about UI (Key-Binding, UI-Contexts, Commands) and not so how to access data. The only review I found until now is a short sentence in Ed Merks blog where people told him that the talk was "really good". So looking forward for more comments. I think the small application I presented there is what many people requested on the "E4-symposia" when they asked about a best practice example.

I even thought about restarting on an accompanying book about all the stuff one can find in the example and technologies but dismissed this thought immediately because I simply don't have the time and financial grounding to spend my time on it. The time (=money) my small company is investing in Eclipse is big enough already.

Conclusion

I would appreciate to get more comments about my presentation and ask myself why the same we had one EclipseCon was done where people got small pieces of paper to give back comments.

I think the intention was that people use gPublication to do so but it looks like people don't know about this. So if you want to give feedback and get access to the slides please do so at:

• E4-Modeling the workbench: here


• Datacentric RCP: here

but I'm afraid not all people attending my talks are really following my blog or the Planet so the feedback is going to be less than it was on EclipseCon.

If you and your company need help to get started with Eclipse RCP and other Eclipse technologies like OSGi, the modeling stack like (EMF, Teneo, CDO) my company is offering consultancy and development resources to anyone interested.

The E4 symposia

The symposia once more was I think a well received offer of Eclipse Summit Europe to the community and we talked about a lot different things in the E4 space. Boris Bokowski summarized the symposia in here.

For me as someone taking part in E4 project it is important to get feedback from the community to integrate their wishes (if my time permits) in the code base.

Socializing

I got to know my new people and we had a lot of interesting chats about new ideas (e.g. declarative ui) so it's hard to get back to reality and working on all those boring stuff.

I am in the Oredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. I had my talk yesterday. I think it was well received, (many attendees from Sony Ericsson). I have uploaded my slides from the talk. You can find them in the eRCP website along other resources.

My Rational Application Developer was very very kind today to me while I was doing some kind of tracing:

Time to load bundles: 14
Starting application: 1594
Application Started: 18245
I LOVE YOU
Valid-responses ok error M E Removed New-entry MT Created Remove-entry Clear-sticky Checked-in Merged Clear-static-directory Update-existing Copy-file Set-sticky Valid-requests Mod-time Notified Set-static-directory Template Updated Module-expansion
valid-requests

That's an example!

Here's another update on the nodeset expansion capability in the XSL Tools Debugger. It's now working pretty closely to what I wanted it to do.



I have some more testing to do, particularly with larger nodesets. The only item I would like to do is figure out how to change the icon that is displayed so that I can differentiate between Elements, Attributes, Comments, and Processing Instructions. Any hints from the eclipse Debug team on what needs to be implemented or overriden would be appreciated.

The day started with David Wood talking about the Symbian decision to become open source.


Fragmentation caused by too many mobile operating systems dilutes the industry's effort while open source helps to create a more successful, cohesive, productive community. Stability and quality of the base, agility in responding to changing needs, and a growing base of skilled developers are key aspects to a platform's success. Open source lowers barriers to entry, but it's not a panacea because integration and cohesion are always a challenge, and fragmentation is always a risk and in fact open source makes that risk more likely. A copyleft license like Eclipse Public License helps avoid that, though it's not always possible to consume the changes external parties make to the base. A very large number of companies have signed up to participate in this system. Good luck Symbian!

After that is was time for my stupid modeling talk. By the way, did you notice that in Ian's blog, all the people talked about modeling, even Doug Gaff? Resistance is futile. As I tried to bring up my screen on the projector, my computer decided to go to lala land so I had to power down and reboot. There's nothing quite like an untimely technical failure (like there's ever a timely one!) to get a guy off to a great start. Oh well, I think it went very well, judging by the comments I got afterward.

After the meeting I had a chat with Axel Rittershaus of Skyway Software.


He really liked my talk and we speculated about the various reasons why there are so very many misconceptions around modeling. Skyway uses EMF to help build their tools and models and those in turn are helping their end-users generate web applications. There's meta in action for you!

After that I chatted with Cameron Bateman of Oracle.


I've chatted with him a few times on IRC's #eclipse-modeling, so it was especially nice to get to meet him in person. We chatted about how best to sync up a model and a DOM and about rendering something that's better than the ugly properties view we have right now. It's great working with enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude.

I was chatting with so many people, I missed the Ecore Tools talk and the Tom Schindl's talk. That made me really sad, especially when everyone told me they were both really good. Darned ESE is too short so there's not enough time to do everything. I also spent time with Stefan Eberle chatting about the AUTOSAR implementation he's working on. I should have taken more pictures; yet more brain failure. Then I missed Rich's Amalgamation talk. Double darn. I'm going to have to cut some of those conversations short next year, because before I knew it, the summit was over after short wrap-up at 5:00.

For dinner I went out with some of the board members and some of the folks considering the possibility of starting an automotive working group. We meet with them tomorrow early, and I still don't have my slides ready. I'd best get to it!

Over the last three days, I was participating in the Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, the Eclipse community's european meeting in Ludwigsburg. Specifically, on Tuesday I moderated the Modeling Symposium. I really liked it this year - the submitted papers were on really interesting topics (model migration, semantics, notation, for example) and not the "usual" trivial stuff. Because every presenter had only 15 minutes (and we really enforced it :-)), people had to get to the point quickly, so the presentation part
was really quite fast-paced.

In the afternoon we had Open Space discussions on some of the same topics, and we recorded a couple of video interviews (stay tuned :-)).

As usual, Ed Merks has created a great blog entry about this event, so I just refer to him for more detail :-)

There are four days left until the submission system for EclipseCon 2009 closes.  If you have been thinking about speaking at EclipseCon, but just have not gotten around to it, now is the time.

It's not quite time to panic, we can save that for Monday afternoon.  Better, just go to the submission system make a proposal.

Those of you who have taken time to make a submission or two, thank you very much.  I am continually amazed by the quality of the proposed talks.  I don't envy the category reps, it's going to be tough to choose between so many great talks.

I really feel lucky to be a part of such an amazing community that has so many interesting things going on.

This year’s Eclipse Summit is nearly over and I managed to upload all my slides to this new slideshare service. The good thing about this service is that your slides show up on your talk page, e.g. the slides of the EPP talk are available on this page.

Speaking of this talk: It covered two topics - we started with the new EPP Dynamic Download Wizard that is currently only available for Friends-of-Eclipse, but (a) it will be available for everybody soon [promised!] and (b) it is just another reason to join the Friends-of-Eclipse program.

The second topic of this talk was the ‘RAPification’ of the UDC and how we are analyzing the usage data that we are collecting with that. Imagine you have your own RAP application (btw, it works with an RCP application as well) and you want to find out how people are using your RAP application, or you want to analyze the usability of this application. Our solution is based on a slightly modified version of the UDC that enables us to collect the usage data and write it to a central database.

And now comes the cool part: How to analyze the data. This is done in a way similar to Google Analytics, because we allow the user to interactively explore the data that is visible as an overlay in the application. This works in a RCP application, but also in your browser window if it is a RAP application.

All of this has been created as a Google Summer of Code project, but I think this kind of tooling could be helpful and interesting to many of us.

This week, the OCL 2.1 RTF has had to re-launch the voting on its first ballot, because it failed to reach a quorum.  With a 10-member voting list, 2 votes just didn't cut it.  And these were the two companies that put some effort into resurrecting this specification by addressing a substantial number of issues.

Well, the closing session is about to start and the vendors are packing up their displays. Another successful Eclipse Summit Europe is about to go off into the sunset. For me, it was proof again why I love coming to this show. The CDT community in Europe is strong and a lot of them are doing and want to do interesting things with the CDT.

The talk I gave was on the code analysis capabilities of the CDT introducing the things you can do with the CDT's parsers and indexing framework. I also introduced the new refactoring engine that we have which really opens up a lot of cool automations you can do to analyze and refactor your code. The best part is that I had a few guys come up to me after to ask about certain analysis things they wanted to do. I'm glad I gave that talk and I hope more people take a look at what the CDT has to offer in this area.

I also had a number of people ask about the CDT managed build system. This is an area in a bit of trouble right now with the CDT. One of the key developers has left and we're struggling understanding the code that he left behind. Hopefully these vendors who have concerns about the build system will join us and get us rolling again. The CDT build model can do some pretty cool things and I look forward to seeing the different build integrations people are thinking of working.

I had a discussion with someone interested in working on the Windows debug integration I have on my wish list. I've given it a couple of tries and there is a start of one in the Target Communication Framework (TCF) agent. Hopefully we can finally get this together and have full support for the Visual C++ compiler with the CDT.

Speaking of TCF, there was a lot of interest in it from various embedded system vendors. It's a really good technology for building target agents with a clean communication protocol back to Eclipse and a services oriented architecture. I've been interested in component models for C/C++ applications and I can see how this agent could use something like that. I'll have to give it some thought and see if others are interested in getting involved in that.

It's been a fun and interesting week. Hopefully I talked to everyone who wanted to talk CDT with me. And hopefully we can get some momentum off of that to continue the growth of the CDT community. Those late nights in the hotel bar with the Eclipse gang was part of that community building and I'm going to sleep well on the flight home but it was worth it.

Glimmer's code was finally approved and committed to the Eclipse SVN repository:
http://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.glimmer.core

I'll be maintaining it at that location from this point on.

Here is the new Eclipse technology project page:
http://www.eclipse.org/glimmer/

And here is the about page:
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project_summary.php?projectid=technology.glimmer

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