Jeff on Eclipse

I’ve mentioned previously that Eclipse is coming alive as a place for runtime technology. The last few days have seen some more concrete steps down that path. Last Wednesday the Eclipse RT top-level project had a successful creation review. So over the next few days the project itself will be provisioned and open for business. In the proposal there were 6 projects declaring their intention to move: Equinox, RAP, ECF, Swordfish, Riena and EclipseLink. While the path is now clear for these moves, I wouldn’t expect to see a mad rush. Each project will move at its own pace. After all, several of the projects are shooting to release in the next few months and really don’t need the distraction of messing with repositories, bugs, etc. There are several other projects including eRCP, EILF and Corona that have expressed interest in a new home. Most likely there will be some discussions on this at EclipseCon and on the RT newsgroup in the coming days.

In other news, today we are announcing the creation of an Equinox Community portal. The portal is a recognition that runtime technology at Eclipse spans the entire ecosystem today and will continue to do so tomorrow. We can’t (and actually don’t want to) contain it all in the RT project. The portal is a landing site for people looking to know more about Eclipse in runtime scenarios. It gives you a view of Eclipse through runtime glasses. You can information on the related projects and technologies, demos, tutorial, articles and other resources.

If you are at EclipseCon on Tuesday, come by the Equinox Community talk that Jochen Krause and I (the RT PMC co-leads) are giving. The slides will be on the web and there is a white paper that paints the vision and benefits of the approach we see evolving. Also check out Ian’s post for more info.  (Damn that Ian for posting before me…)

I’m a fan of simplicity. Hopefully that shows through in the Code 9 website.

As mentioned elsewhere (here here here), the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors election results are in. I am very pleased to have been re-elected for another term.  I mentioned in my vision statement that working on the board is extremely educational and gratifying.  Gaining the support of the community to do that work is doubly so.  Thanks to everyone who voted and to the other candidates for making it an interesting process.

I have to say however that I am bummed that Howard Lewis, a long time elected add-in provider representative, chose not to run again this year so tomorrow will be his last board meeting.  It is our loss.  Thanks Howard for many years of great service to the Eclipse community.

You know those times when you are blissfully away from email and you come back and all hell has broken loose? That’s me today as I read the various posts and messages about e4. Hopefully the following will help make things better rather than making them worse…

First, to dispel some myths.

• There is no evil plan. Actually, there is really only a plan to make a plan.
• There is no prototype. There are some wads of code that people have used to test and express their ideas. Some of those wads are useful as demos. Some as stalking horses. None of the code is real in any way.

Ok, so what’s happened here? At least part of it is a miscommunication/misunderstanding around the creation of an “e4″ component in the Eclipse Project Incubator. That component is NOT e4. So what is it? Aside from being unfortunately named, it is a place to put the demo code and random hackings that would be used to facilitate discussions around creating an e4 proposal and interesting EclipseCon talk.

There is no doubt that the Eclipse project team has a reputation for being closed. Being more open has been one of our goals for the past couple years. There has been good progress but there is still a ways to go.

In any event, it is actually the, perhaps clumsy, implementation of the desire to be open and create the open community structures (e.g., projects) that has gotten us here.

Early on there was discussion around branching the platform code in-place, doing the work in a set of Eclipse project incubator components, … We quickly saw that making a full-on project was the only right direction.

In the normal process of creating a project

An individual or group of individuals declares their interest in, and rationale for, establishing a project. The EMO will assist such groups in the preparation of a project Proposal.

So the current incubator component and all discussions up to now have really been focused on getting to the point of proposing a project. Not on actually doing the work.

Once a project is proposed

The proposers, in conjunction with the destination PMC and the community, collaborate in public to enhance, refine, and clarify the proposal.

So the proposal is the real beginning of collaboration, community building and the work.

The communication around, and creation of, the e4 component confused things and was (reasonably) perceived as saying “here is e4 and these people are working on it and there is a direction and …”.  Its all done so to speak.  In reality it is none of the above.

It could be (and has been) reasonably argued that more communication in the pre-proposal phase would have been the way to go. In retrospect, that looks like wise advice.

With mea culpas, clown noses and red faces all around the team, I propose that we, collectively, all of us, attempt to reset our thinking and perceptions, and make the reality be a completely open, innovative and interesting e4 project that takes Eclipse to the next level.

Each year when the board election comes around I have to remember how it works.

By now everyone eligible should have received a password email enabling them to vote. If you have a password and have not yet voted, please do so now. There’s no point in having an election if people don’t vote.

Now, if you do not have a password but think you are eligible to vote, read on…

Only members can vote.

Who is a member? Well, committers who work for a member company or those independent committers who have signed individual committer membership papers.

Apparently some very small number of independent committers go through the process of becoming a member. You should. Its pretty easy. I recently left IBM and became an independent committer. Walking the process to become a member took about 10 minutes and most of that was the time to print and fax the forms.

These forms are different from the committer paperwork that you filled out. Membership is not automatic.

If you hurry, you might be able to get the forms in and processed in time to vote. Why bother? Well, for one, your vote will count for as much as all of IBM’s, Oracle’s, Intel’s, … Votes from committers at member companies are aggregated down into one vote so us independents wield just as much power as the big guys.

I was thinking the other day, “Why am I running for re-election in the current Eclipse Board elections?” It’s really quite a bit of work. There are monthly phone calls, quarterly face to face meetings, committees and working groups, prep for all of the above, … Oh my!

All in all I figure it takes at least 5 days a quarter just to keep up. If you want to help drive things, well, you could easily double that. When you figure there are about 50-55 work days in a quarter (depending on your location’s holiday calendar and your vacation time), that’s at least 10% of your normal work time!

So what’s up with that? We have 8 dedicated committers all willing to contribute still more of their time to help run the foundation. Why?

I can’t answer for the others but I can list some of the reasons I’m on the list.

• The other board members. I’ve mentioned this before but the set of people on the board today is frankly, superb. Diverse, talented, bright, engaged. You can’t pay for a better set of teachers.
• Committer members have an impact. We have day to day knowledge of how the committer community thinks and works, and the kinds of challenges they face. Because of that, we ground the discussions in reality and focus on the things that help committers most.
• Committers don’t know it all. Gads! But its true. Eclipse has a very vibrant commercial aspect that, to be honest, I did not know or particularly care about when I first became a director two years ago. It is extremely interesting to understand. More committers should take some time to understand how their companies and others make money with/from/… Eclipse. The board spends quite a bit of time on this.
• The board meetings. Two days, locked in a room with 30 other people, no internet access, … Wait, that was not one of the pros…

Anyway, we’d be here all day. There are more reasons and many are outlined in my vision statement. The point is, as I went through the list, I quickly realized that being on the board is a huge opportunity that excites and inspires me. That is why I am willing to donate this time.

Eclipse is many things that are good and can be many other great things. The Board of Directors’ mission is:

“to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of [Eclipse]”

There is no better place to be than on the board, if you want to have a hand in shaping the larger Eclipse world. I look forward to another term on the board and more interaction with the entire Eclipse community.

This is a bit off my normal discourse but, well, it may be of service to someone out there.  I recently (yesterday) received a new Lenovo T61p laptop.  Sweet.  1920×1200 screen, fast processor, big drive, …  I’ve spent the past couple days installing stuff and getting it setup. For the most part it has gone swimmingly.  For the most part.

Last night around 1230 I was finishing up some installs and decided to go to bed.  As is my custom I suspended the laptop, got up from the desk and headed off.  There was the normal “going to sleep beep” and as I walked away, the machine beeped again.  It was waking up.  Strange.  It had been suspending fine earlier. 

This sequence was repeated again and again over the following 1.5 hours always with machine waking up.  I tried all manner of things (wake on lan settings, turning off wireless, …).  No joy.  I was starting to believe that it was the physical act of getting up and leaving that was causing the machine to wake.  Enough.  Haunted laptop?  I turned the machine OFF and went to bed incredulous and confused.

This evening the experiments continued.  In the end, after another 2 hours of suspend and resume experiements witnessed by an outside observer (wife), the problem was tracked down to a combination of a power management setting on the Mouse Device and my chair!  No kidding, the chair. 

The mouse was set to “Allow this device to wake the computer”.  Makes sense that that would be a problem but I was being very careful not to touch the machine in any way thoughout the experiments.  In fact, wiggling the mouse, banging the desk, … did NOT wake the machine.

That’s where the chair comes in. It turns out that my chair makes a bit of a thunk sound when I get up and that particular vibration was triggering a mouse button/wheel and waking the machine.  Unplug the mouse (before suspend), OK.  Get up slowly/quietly, OK.  Mouse plugged into any of the three USB ports and the machine wakes up when I stand.  Again, I kid you not.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere about assumptions and side effects.  I prefer to just suspend the machine and walk away shaking my head at how complex things are.

I remember a few weeks ago seeing a message about the Memory Analyzer project proposal. Some guys from SAP were going to open source some of their tooling to analyze Java heap dumps. I didn’t think much about it at the time other than “Hey, that’s probably a good idea”. The other day however, Andreas Buchen, the proposed project lead contacted me about being a mentor so I took a deeper look at what they are proposing.

There is a bunch of info on the SAP Wiki and Andreas has summarized it well in a newsgroup post. This is really cool! Their tool allows you to do all manner of queries and introspection of heaps.  You can look for leaks (why is that object still there?), check memory consumption (aka retained size), create your own queries, etc.

The real kicker for me was the classloader relative searching.  Under the covers, Equinox makes a classloader for every bundle.  So searches by classloader are just a step away from searches by bundle.  This puts the tooling in a much better context for Eclipse developers and, for example, lets you figure out what your bundle is doing with memory etc.

The other thing that is cool is its scalability.  They routinely work on multi-GB dumps and have a whole range of instant queries and fast approximations.

The Memory Analyzer project is quite niche and may not attract that many developers (there is lots of potential for people adding extensions) but as part of the broader suite of JDT and TPTP tooling it is a big win and will attract lots of users.  I encourage you to check out the proposal and show your support on the newsgroup.  Also, you might want to attend their talk at EclipseCon.

p.s., Don’t forget early registration for EclipseCon ends on Feb 14.  Spend your money on your loved ones not late registration for the conference.

What the heck? “Eclipse” and “runtime” in the same sentence? Most people think of Eclipse as a tooling thing. Or perhaps an RCP thing. Well, take a look at the EclipseCon program and you will see that Eclipse is that and a whole lot more. I thought selecting talks on the program committe was hard but choosing which talks to actually attend is going to be even harder!

To see what I mean, go to the EclipseCon site and pick any of the days on the left. Then scroll down to the track selector and check only Eclipse as a Platform, OSGi DevCon and Rich Client Platform. Now look at the program. It doesn’t matter what day you pick, you will be double or triple booked pretty much the whole time. It is going to be a very busy week.

To make matters harder, I found many talks related to runtimes and platforms that did not fit nicely into the canned tracks. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• Eclipse Riena Project
• eRCP vs Android et al
• Swordfish
• Eclipse Command Language
• Jazz Ajax Framework
• RAP vs GWT
• API Tooling

Ok the last one is tooling and I am biased by involvement but how could a runtime guy not jump with joy about tooling that helps makes your modules more modular and backward compatibility a reality?

Anyway, all up I counted about 25 long talks (including those above) and about 40 short talks related to Equinox, Eclipse in various runtime/platform guises, OSGi, etc. Hope a lot of them are being recorded…

Don’t miss the fun, go register before the Valentine’s Day deadline and spend the money you saved on something for that someone special. See you there.

Oh, and for you committers out there, don’t miss the Committer Hackathon on all week.  Get your team together and hack like crazy.

It is that time of year again — the elections for your committer and add-in representatives to the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors is here. This year the list of candidates is most impressive. Last year the committer rep candidate list was unfortunately dominated by IBMers (including me!). This year less than half the candidates are from IBM and Mik and me are from small Eclipse-related startups (yes, I left IBM). The better breadth of experience and focus is greater this year as well. There are candidates from the embedded, web and tooling platform areas of Eclipse. It would be good to have more than me waving the runtime flag but that will come as Eclipse broadens this year.

Regardless of what part of Eclipse you focus on, please check out the various mission statements and see which fit best with where you think Eclipse is and where it should be going. The coming year is going to be very exciting with lots of new projects, directions and challenges. Voting in the election is one way that you can help shape those changes. Voting starts on February 25th and goes until March 7th.