EclipseCon 2008 - Day 4

Today is the last and final day at EclipseCon and here are a few notes (organized by sessions):

Panel: Services Versus Extensions by Neil Bartlett, Jeff McAffer, James Branigan, and BJ Hargrave

The panel discussed the pros and cons of OSGi Services and Eclipse Extension Points with James mentioning how Jazz can fuse the two together. While I could not find an article that would explain all three in detail, I did find Neil Bartlett’s article that compares services to extension points.

For those that might want to follow this space more, I suggest visiting Neil’s blog.

Creating Your Own Extension Points: It’s Easier Than You Think! by Mark Melvin

The PowerPoint slides are worth checking out.

Tags: Eclipse, EclipseCon

EclipseCon 2008 - Day 3

It is day 3 at EclipseCon and here are a few notes (organized by sessions):

Eclipse 4.0 by Steve Northover, Jeff McAffer, Jochen Krause, and Mike Wilson

• The goal is to build a better desktop application, make it easier to build plugins, and bring Eclipse to the web.
• The biggest news seem to be around the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) which is a subset of SWT to bring Eclipse to the web.
• The Eclipse versions are splitting. 3.x will be supported into the future while 4.0 moves forward. Changes applied to 4.0 will be applied to 3.x when apt.

PDT - The PHP Development Toolkit by Assaf Almaz

This talk had very little content as it was mostly an overview of what PDT 1.0 currently does and what is going to be new in PDT 1.1. It will be interesting to check out the new PDT 1.1 features when it is released this September (the first milestone is in May). PDT 1.1 will be built upon Eclipse 3.4 and WTP 2.0 (although the presentation mentioned 3.0 so I am confused about that).

Check out the PDT Project page for more info.

The Future of SWT by Silenio Quarti and Steve Northover

A significant amount of work has gone into SWT but more is needed to work within HTML, Flex, Silverlight, etc. Some demos where shown displaying SWT cross-compiled to run in Flex and HTML + Dojo Javascript library. There are implementations for WPF and Cocoa as well. Check out the demos.

Introducing the new Web Tools Javascript Features by Phil Berkland

The JavaScript Development Toolkit (JSDT) is a sub-project of the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) project and currently in incubation. The talk started out with a brief overview of JSDT and then quickly dived into a demo of JSDT features to write and edit JavaScript code. JSDT looks to be more interesting than JSEclipse but check out the demos for more info.

Tags: Eclipse, EclipseCon

EclipseCon 2008 - Day 2

Another day has passed at the conference and here are a few notes (organized by sessions):

How eRCP stacks up against Android and other Mobile Rich Client Platforms by Ken Walker and David Girle

Ken and David built web apps using the following technologies:

• eRCP: Supports a very small user base. Not many apps are developed using eRCP.
• Android: Easy to setup. Only needs the SDK and ADT (Eclipse plugin). Really brings the desktop and mobile world together. Supports JDK 1.5.0. UI is a bit ugly though. Easiest to use but works in an emulator only as no devices exist yet.
• WebKit: Has a popular and large user base due to the iPhone. Works on Android.
• Others (things to consider): Java ME + MIDP 2.0, Adobe Flash/AIR, Silverlight, and GWT + Google Gears.

Based on this discussion, I would focus on the WebKit since it has a good user base already and can be easily tweaked to run on Android as well.

Java Annotations by Walter Harley

I’m glad I don’t have to work with annotations much.

Android and OSGi: Can they work together? by Neil Bartlett and BJ Hargrave

The answer is yes. Neil and BJ demonstrated running Equinox and Concierge on Android and made mention of a couple other OSGi technologies:

• Equinox
• Concierge
• ProSyst
• Felix

Code from the demo can be found here.

Introduction to the Jazz Technology Platform by John Wiegand

• Jazz is built upon layers (listed from top to bottom): Clients (Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc.), Jazz Server Kernal (works with Jetty and Tomcat), Databases (state is stored as structured items stored as XML and arbitrary content stored as BLOBs), and finally the Equinox OSGi Framework.
• Supports Lucene full-text search.
• Authentication is performed by the Jazz Team Server communicating with a corporate directory server (LDAP).
• Teams have projects and projects have processes.
• In the future, Jazz will support more of a Web UI and communication protocol.

Probably best if you just check out the Jazz Demo Videos rather than refer to my notes.

Android, OSGi & Cloudsmith: Cool Things Come in Threes by Ken Gilmer, Lucas McGregor and Henrik Lindberg

Interesting talk that discussed using web technologies to develop, test, and use applications and hardware. For instance:

• Cloudsmith + Eclipse Spaces + Felix + Android.
• Cloudsmith + Felix + Bug Labs
• Cloudsmith + XDrive

The demo showed a picture taken by a Bug Labs device and uploaded to an Android emulator.

Introduction to Groovy by Andres Almiray

• Groovy is a an agile and dynamic language built on Java.
• Looks like Java code which means the learning curve is very low for a Java developer.
• Compiles to Java byte code so that it can run anywhere Java does.
• You can use dynamic or static typing.
• Variable interpolation can be used: ${my-variable-to-substitute}
• Exceptions can be caught but if you choose not too catch them, they will be promoted as runtime exceptions by Groovy.
• Supports annotations (JSR 175), generics, enums, and closures.
• Supports operator overloading.
• There is an Ecipse plugin for developing Groovy code in Eclipse.

In case you are looking for other languages that can compile to Java byte code, they are: Scala and JRuby.

Tags: Eclipse, EclipseCon

EclipseCon 2008 - Day 1

EclipseCon 2008 is being held in sunny Santa Clara, CA this week (Monday - Thursday) and I am here attending as well as helping out with a few presentations:

• Embedding Eclipse Equinox for Fun & Profit
• Remotely deploying Equinox with Maynstall
• Where’s the Data? A Device Kit Tutorial.

For those of you on site, hopefully you have attended the Band XI presentations this morning and you will join us this afternoon for the final presentation on Device Kit. Otherwise, check out the links for further information as the Band XI team has been doing some very interesting work in the embedded space using OSGi technology.

Even though I am only operating on four hours of sleep (more than I can say for the rest of my comrades) I must say it is great being here and getting a chance to see some of the old OTI crowd. It almost feels like the annual technical conferences held many years ago before IBM consumed OTI.

I’ll be posting notes and content as (or when) I can throughout the week. Stay tuned.

Tags: Eclipse, EclipseCon